
Hello there! This is Cyborg / Mistery <cyborg@otitsun.oulu.fi> 1997
writing this additional textfile...

So,

What is it?

This is a 32-bit DOS extender -- a program which allows MS-DOS programs to
run in 32-bit protected mode under ancient 16-bit MS-DOG.

It is written by Tran quite a long time ago. Actually even so long that
we hadn't NASM at that time. So Tran had to use TASM, Borland's pitiful
Turbo Assembler.

Not so any more: I have ported this excellent DOS extender for the excellent
NASM 0.95. Also all example files are ported. All examples are tested under
VCPI, DPMI, XMS and raw protected mode without any problems. So it should
work.

Basically I just changed TASM syntax into NASM syntax. I also reformatted
whole source into the way I like it. If you don't, well, I don't care.

There are some things you'd better to know, anyway:

 - The original PMODE used two segments, one for 32-bit code and another 
   for 16-bit mode. But with NASM this isn't any more necessary, so I combined
   the segments together: there's only single segment containing both
   16 and 32-bit code.

 - You can't compile this PMODE and your PMODE program seperately into OBJs
   and link them later together; instead the PMODE code has to be %included
   into your program. This is because I couldn't get TLINK to link many
   OBJs together correctly; and we don't have NLINK (The Netwide Linker) 
   (yet?). However, this shouldn't be too big problem because assemblers are
   so much faster than eg. C compilers and if you run out of memory you can
   always switch to 32-bit protected mode version of NASM, on any platform.

 - How to use: In to the top of your PMODE put %include "pmode.asm" directive.
   And the very last, put the CODEEND macro which gets defined in pmode.asm.
   Otherwise it works as Tran writes in pmode.doc.

Btw, there are newer versions of Tran's PMODE too, especially the 3.x versions.
But I like this 2.x version more and it was easier to convert for NASM.

And remember -- give credits for Tran when you use PMODE. And it wouldn't
harm to send some greetings for NASM team and perhaps even for me.

	- <cyborg@otitsun.oulu.fi> - http://stekt.oulu.fi/~tuukkat/scene.html