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TrumanApple

macrumors member
Original poster
Jan 2, 2005
87
0
Is this possible? In my systems programming class we are using 32 bit MASM to program, and i have a mac. Is it still possible to do this from my mac without virual pc?
 

VanMac

macrumors 6502a
May 26, 2005
914
0
Rampaging Tokyo
Not likely. You are programming instructions for a specific processor (x86). There may be some sort of emulator you could run your code on....

You could write all your code on the mac, as you only need some text editor, but debugging or running it would be a different story...
 

mrichmon

macrumors 6502a
Jun 17, 2003
873
3
TrumanApple said:
Is this possible? In my systems programming class we are using 32 bit MASM to program, and i have a mac. Is it still possible to do this from my mac without virual pc?

Often for systems programming courses you will be running your assembly code in a CPU simulator. This protects you from hosing the running system and usually allows you to see the contents of the registers and CPU state to help you learn what is going on. If your course is using a Intel CPU simulator then may be possible to get that simulator or something comparable which runs on OS X natively. As an example, the Bochs IA-32 emulator runs on a Mac the QEMU emulator may also run on a Mac.

For comparison, I used to teach SPARC assembly but the student labs had mostly windows machines. So we used a SPARC cpu simulator which run on Windows (and various other platforms since it was written in tk/tcl).

Try googling for intel cpu simulator "OS X" which appears to turn up some pointers to useful simulators.
 

rhix

macrumors newbie
Jul 1, 2004
13
0
Winnipeg,MB
NASM is portable

If your goal is to write 32bit x86 Assembly, then you could use the Netwide Assembler (NASM). It's freely available online, and has been ported to run on many architectures. I've written a ton of x86 asm from my alpha. Of course, that doesn't let you _run_ the code. I'd get some emulator like QEMU (or Bochs) for that with a DOS image.

MASM sucks, it introduces a lot of stuff in assembly that really shouldn't be there. Data types? The CPU doesn't give a rat's ass if your int is signed or unsigned, it'll run the exact same operations on it either way. So why should you care?

I've used MASM, TASM, and NASM, and NASM was by far the best one for me.
 

notjustjay

macrumors 603
Sep 19, 2003
6,056
167
Canada, eh?
I used to TA a course where we had a Java-based simulator of X86 assembly language. I was just trying to find it, but it doesn't seem to be posted online. Sorry. :)
 
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