Subj : Open Watcom 2.0 port of HPT
To   : All
From : andrew clarke
Date : Sun Feb 14 2021 06:05:12

Earlier this week I backported HPT to Open Watcom 2.0, which can be used to build the 32-bit OS/2 & Windows versions.

I say "backported" loosely. SMAPI could once be built with the closed-source Watcom C 10.0. This was common when Paul Edwards ported Msged to 32-bit OS/2 in 1995, and when I ported MSGAPI38 (which was then renamed SMAPI) to Windows NT a few years later. Fast forward to 2021 and there's a working Watcom makefile (make/makefile.watcom) for each Husky module (huskylib, smapi, etc) needed to build HPT.

The makefile.watcom file for each module was written to be cross-platform, so you can cross-compile the OS/2 & Windows version from Linux, using the Linux version of OW 2.0. Or you can build it from Windows or OS/2 in the normal way, with the same makefile, without cross-compiling.

Theoretically the binaries should run on anything from Windows NT 3.1 and OS/2 2.0 onwards.


The forked modules are here:

https://github.com/zoomosis/huskylib
https://github.com/zoomosis/smapi
https://github.com/zoomosis/fidoconf
https://github.com/zoomosis/areafix
https://github.com/zoomosis/hpt


To build the Windows version:

Install Git.

Install the latest snapshot of Open Watcom 2.0 from here:

https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2/releases/download/Last-CI-build/ow-snapshot.tar.gz

Set the correct PATH, INCLUDE and LIB environment variables for OW 2.0, then:

git clone https://github.com/zoomosis/huskylib
cd huskylib/make
wmake -f makefile.watcom
cd ../..

etc.

The correct build order for each module is: huskylib smapi fidoconf areafix hpt


To build the OS/2 version use this instead:

wmake -f makefile.watcom OS2=1


Disclaimer:

I haven't actually tested the resulting binaries much yet. The main challenge I set myself was just to get HPT to build without errors.


Footnote:

I actually did all the porting work under FreeBSD 12 AMD64. FreeBSD can run most Linux binaries, and the 64-bit Linux binaries of OW 2.0 all run without any problems. There's no real emulation going on. FreeBSD just translates the binary's Linux system calls to and from its native BSD syscalls. This is similar to how WINE works but with much less translation overhead.

Like older versions of Watcom, OW 2.0 can also compile to 32-bit DOS as well as 16-bit DOS, OS/2 & Windows. Cross-compiling a 16-bit OS/2 binary from a FreeBSD host is fun in a weird twisted way.

--- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20180707
 * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)

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