My C programming is getting stronger and stronger, and now that I am starting on Assembly programming, I thought I would put my C skills to the test and try to write myself a little tool.
There's a program called Emu8086 which is a stepping 8086 assembler and emulator that can run programs instruction by instruction. This is cool, but the program is I believe abandoned, and also paid, which are two things that don't go well together.
Either way, my current project, called Amp8086 out of a massive, unending ego, as well as a complete and total lack of any creativity on my part, is an MS-DOS oriented 8086 IDE, including a text editor with support for Unix and DOS line endings for easy use of files from both OS families, an MASM compatible 8086 assembler (MASM as that's what I've been learning currently), and a simple stepping 8086 emulator.
The program is in preliminary stages, with time being sporadically placed into it, but I hope to get text manipulation working in a week, including I/O.
It is written entirely in C, and will be tested to run in DOSBox, but the idea would be to use something like VMWare with a much faster system to get a much more capable program.
Why DOS? Because I got annoyed with setting up the one C display library that claimed to be simple, so I decided DOS it was. This will be released for completely free use, but I may or may not charge for private use of the source code.
I do have a picture of the text editing UI that I made:
Currently only basic text editing is working, but I've been reorganizing my thoughts, and I have some very basic buffer manipulation.
Here is a semi-mockup (Was done using the program, but the proper functionality isn't really in there yet) I made of what code might look like in the IDE:
My personal development environment has also changed. I am now using a RasPi 3 over SSH with X11 tunneling to use DOSBox. All text is edited in GNU Nano, and compiled using TC.