MS-DOS indie gamedev, demoscene and similar "oldschool" forums usually recommend one of these options:

1. DJGPP
2. Turbo C++
3. Watcom C/C++

I possess MiSTeR FPGA with ao486 core so thought that would be a cool target to play a bit with but I need a development environment.

So... I created a development kit repository, providing tools to create MS-DOS COM an EXE files with the current GCC. It also provides ao486-simulation configs for dosbox-x and x86box. Finally it has a QEMU launcher emulating 486 SX 33 MHz, which matches ao486.

And yes, it's GCC + GAS thing plain and simple. I'm not really familiar with nasm etc. Before GAS it was TASM (Turbo Assembler) :-) Important thing here is that it has a C orchestrator and does not require FASM to provide MZ stub.

AKA edit-compiler-run delivered :-)

As a test run I have a test program does only some silly graphics but does give 486 a good test run given that:

1. 486 optimized codebase with a mentionable portion assembly (and I really did enjoy this).
2. Weird display mode in 320x240 256 color resolution and page flpping.
3. Configures memory to flat realmode (aka "unreal mode") and piggybacks lua-precalculated texture and palette to an additional .rodata_32 section.

Will be out in the foreseeable future...

#MiSTeR #FPGA #Ao486 #DOS #486