Re: LYNX-DEV 387 emulator

[Doug Kaufman]

On Thu, 12 Mar 1998, Bill Schiavo wrote:

> Are the any patches necessary to build lynx with wmem?  I would like to
> try it and get rid of emu387.dxe.

I think there are actually two parts to your question: getting rid of a
separate *.dxe emulator, and the use of wmemu. You can get rid of the
separate emu387.dxe emulator by linking with libemu.a during the
compilation. Just add "-lemu" to the end of LIBS in the makefile.dos.
The wmemu emulator comes in both flavors, wmemu.dxe and libwmemu.a. It is
supposed to give better emulation, but is larger than emu387.dxe and is
released under GNU license. According the the DJGPP FAQ, the binaries on
the DJGPP distribution sites don't work, so to use wmemu, you need to
compile the libraries. This requires an included file from the DJGPP
library sources, so to compile you need wmemu2s.zip and djlsr201.zip,
available from the usual DJGPP archive sites such as SIMTEL:
"ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2misc/wmemu2s.zip";
"http://www.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/gnu/djgpp/v2/djlsr201.zip";
To link with wmemu, add "-lwmemu" to the end of LIBS in makefile.dos.

I am not sure which strategy is best for a precompiled file for
distribution. Linking in the emulator makes it easier for the average
user, if they need floating point emulation. The downside is that the
majority of users, who don't need the emulation, are left with a binary
file which is bigger by about 20K for -lemu and by about 50K for
-lwmemu. I am not sure if with the current size of the lynx binary, we
may not exceed the memory of some machines which might otherwise be able
to run lynx_386.
                                 Doug
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Doug Kaufman
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