Link&Locate 86?

Hi,

Does any of you All knows what happened to the old Link&Locate? It seems to have totally vanished, and I don't see much suitable replacement for it...

TIA,

Phil

Reply to
Philippe Auphelle
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These guys can probably help you:

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Reply to
Jim Stewart

There were at least three such tools once available, years back. I remember one coming from SSI (Systems & Software, Inc.), which is the one you are mentioning. Their product worked with Microsoft C (v 5.0 and 5.1, when I was using it) and MASM (also 5.0 and 5.1) and they also had another product called "SoftProbe." Paradigm Systems was some of their competition (mentioned in the above link) at the time, if memory serves.

Rick Naro of Paradigm was very kind to me a few years back and after some email exchanges and a phone call or two, took all the trouble it took them to provide me with a complete, older package of their C compiler and linking tools. It wasn't easy for them and we went through a couple of iterations of effort on their end. He didn't charge. You might explain carefully your circumstances and need and ask them to suggest an option. I believe you will find them to be very fair and earnest, based on my own experiences.

I don't believe their product has the ability to copy segments, just classes. But you probably don't need that feature, anyway.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Perhaps this one

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?

Hans

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Reply to
Hans

Thanks a lot to you all.

I have a moderately complex link / locate problem that (if I remember) some of the latest (and last) generation of "technical" OMF overlay linkers were able to solve. Heck, the documentation for a linker like PLINK was a thick 3-ring binder, and it had nearly as much directives as the CPU has instructions! In one word, the problem is about having volatile (init time) segments and core segments, all in a Group, and having the toolchain insure that no code from the core ever attempts to reference anything from the init (while references the other way are allowed). When I started to google around a few days ago, I realized that all of those mighty linking tools had totally disappeared. They were already considered outmoded when the internet started to build up, so they hardly ever got referenced.

Jonathan, I found that Link&Locate belonged to SSI, then Beacon Development Tools, that merged into Embedded System Products, Inc in Dec

98, and then was bought at some point by Quadros Systems, Inc, that is now in a different sector of activity. I just discovered today that Comsol, a UK company, *seems* to still carry the SSi tools.

Jim and Jonathan, I have been in contact with Rick Caro of Paradigm - Paradigm was in my investigation list for the kind of tools I'm after. He's been nice, helpful and friendly, but the Paradigm tools don't have what I'm looking for.

Hans, thanks for a great link. I thought those too had definitely gone to oblivion.

The bottom line is that I went back to the TIS Relocatable OMF Specification 1.1 and I'm about to make my own tools. I shouldn't have to go to the point of writing my own linker / locator :) , but I'll take the same .obj files input as the linker to provide the checking I need and abort the make if any error appears.

Doesn't seem too bad at this point.

Thanks again to all,

Phil

Philippe Auphelle wrote:

Reply to
Philippe Auphelle

There is also a linker from Intel as part of their 386 builder toolset (if I remember the approximate name, correctly.) I still have one version of that linker and am still using it. It doesn't support all the record types generated by the C compiler tools I use with it, so had to build a custom tool to adapt the object files for the Intel linker/locator.

But it looks as though you have a plan. Best of luck with that. Do you have the specification for the object file format you need to process? (In other words, is the specification you mention above the full one for the object file format you will be working with?)

Thanks for the update.

Jon

Reply to
Jonathan Kirwan

Jon,

What I'm processing is at this point strictly OMF coming from MS MASM

7.x (aka ML).

Yes, that of writing a quick and dirty validation tool as a Delphi Win32 console program to process the OMF files and check what I have to. I don't need to process all the OMF types for that, just half a dozen. I'll run it just before the link, it will take the same file list and abort the build before the link if it finds an error.

Yes, thanks. The format is the "MS brew" of the OMF format, and that one was easy to locate. It's a PDF file titled

Tool Interface Standards (TIS) Relocatable Object Module Format (OMF) Specification Version 1.1 (TIS Committee, May 1995)

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This describes the OMF format as Microsoft and other dev tools creators used it before MS decided to switch to COFF. That's different enough from the pure Intel OMF to make interoperability problematic, but the differences are documented well enough.

Just in the unlikely case this can save someone some time... sometime:

For that kind of job, the most advanced linker I have found so far is OptLink: It belongs to Digital Mars, in their Digital Mars C/C++ package. I bought their CD (it's a bargain), but Optlink can also be downloaded free from the Digital Mars site as part as the C/C++ package:

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OptLink can generate any type of 16-bit code (.com/.sys/.bin, DOS EXE, Win 3.x EXE, OS/2 EXE, and Win32 32-bit PE .EXE. It has more useful options than any other linker I could find today, and very precise diags if something goes wrong in the linking process. It only does OMF code, and it's not a locator (well, except in the simple case when you can live with a COM or BIN file format).

For the record, Optlink was initially from SLR Systems (great OMF linker, and they had the best assembler, OptASM back then too). It was sold long ago to Symantec, and Digital Mars now holds the part of the Symantec portfolio that includes OptLink.

Isn't it strange one has to recreate some basic tools like this after all these years! /Ph.

J> >

Reply to
Philippe Auphelle

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