• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

16-bit Watcom C and memory models

As far as I know, the latest official build of Open Watcom is 1.9. AFAIK 2.0 is an unofficial fork, so these things can happen. Generally speaking, it's very annoying to use an experimental new release of an application, only to realize that they changed something that they did with the best intention, but makes it work differently or just not working anymore.

This and other reasons is why I stick with Borland Turbo C++ 1.0 and TASM 2.0. It's not that they are exempt from bugs, not at all, but at least they are just like old friends that you know very well how they behave with no surprises. The other reasons why I prefer them to modern assemblers/compilers have nothing to do with the subject of this thread: I just love to code with real period tools and also love the possibility to build the code on period computers (anything that wears an 8088 or higher).
 
They are doing their best to keep it a secret, but the real Open Watcom team is still alive and working, and they have their own 2.0 version in the works.


From that site:

Update!

Now you can also download a ready made "next generation" build.
Two builds are available, a "stable" one and the latest "field test".

http://openwatcom.org/ftp/source/ow_portable_v2_stable.zip
http://openwatcom.org/ftp/source/ow_portable_v2_test_build.zip

Also, here is the link to current official 1.9 download.

http://openwatcom.org/ftp/install/

And a few of our backup mirrors

http://sininenankka.dy.fi/watcom_mirror/
https://fef.net/watcom/
https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/ftp.openwatcom.org/


Open Watcom Team
24-FEB-2026
Click to expand...
 
Semi-related, I'm a big fan of Open Watcom 1.9 and I know most of the quirks that any reasonable (or unreasonable) person would need to work around. All of mTCP is based on OW 1.9, and I've even grown fond of the assembler. (The inline assembly options have always been good too.)

Just ask for help .. it's out there.
 
Apologies for getting slightly off topic; I spent a few tokens and commissioned a summary [1] of Open Watcom 2.0's optimisations specifically for the 8086. There are really interesting things in there I didn't know before; eg. when it caches constant array references (and the surprisingly many cases when it doesn't), how to best write inline assembly (always use modify exact!), the many clever optimisations of long arithmetic, and some disappointments (no use of XLAT).

[1] https://github.com/ggeorgovassilis/public/blob/master/open watcom/8086_optimisations_report.md
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top