In continuation of my previous thread about fasm's origins, I now release to you another pieces from my archive, which include the earliest existing version of flat assembler.

As I already mentioned in other places, fasm was initially running in protected mode under my own DOS extender, called HDOS (and based on the PMODE extender by Thomas Pytel), and then assembler and extender were both parts of one package, as they needed each other - fasm was needed to assemble HDOS (and also itself), and HDOS was needed to run fasm. I recovered two such packages.

First one, from spring 1999, contains HDOS 2.03 and the very first version of fasm, called 0.90 - but this is not the same as 0.9 which one year later I released through freedos-dev, as I restarted the versioning when I first made fasm public. This initial version used HDOS, ran in protected mode and was able to generate executables in HF format (it was the format which HDOS executed).

The second package contains HDOS 3.01, which supported DLLs in HF format, and fasm 1.00 - which was able to assemble such DLL files. Again, this is pre-public versioning, this version is still much earlier than the first public release. The package also contains "flat editor", which was the first version of my editor for fasm. Both fasm and fedit were then ported from HDOS to my Titan OS, but these sources I was not able to recover. And fedit was then rewritten to become Assembler Workplace for Win32, and later I re-made it again into an OS-independent editor core which is now part of fasmw and fasmd.

One thing you may notice is that these early versions were incredibly slow. For the public releases I added the parser module, which made intermediate code for assembler to do multiple passes on, and this did speed it up enough for the time. Many other sub-optimal algorithms were then replaced over the years, and this made fasm faster for larger projects but more complex at the same time. The first versions were really very simple (though perhaps already more complex than my first assembler), and that's why they may be interesting.

So, in spring 2000 I have made fasm to run in flat real mode (so that it would no longer require HDOS), removed HF output support, added parser module to speed it up a little, changed version number back to 0.9 and released it publicly. The rest of fasm's history is already known.

There is one more package I found - it's the library of routines for game programming, in form of DLL compatible with HDOS 3, and also a set of tools to operate on files in HF format and some documentation. It was all assembled with HF-able fasm, and I even tried writing some simple games with it, but none were finished.

The keyboard driver from HGS later became part of the Titan OS, and HGS itself later became the "kelvar" engine, whose unREAL version became one of the official examples on this website.

HDOS not works with windows XP

These programs are provided as just a historical curiosity, and are preserved exactly as they were - so you should not expect them to get any bugfixes required to run in modern environments. But if you want to have a look at their execution, try with DOSBox emulator - everything should run correctly there.

> HDOS not works with windows XP

You don't need a DOS extender in XP

> The second package contains HDOS 3.01, which supported DLLs

COOL

HDOS.ASM 149'658 2000-01-02

FASM source has 7 files 267'205 Byte's, newest 2000-02-13