Ok I actually surprised myself and managed to do it. It took me a bit of figuring out, and I’m sure there’s a simpler way but it worked and I’m happy!
I took a helloworld.c written with Visual Studio and tried DJGPP, but it didn’t seem to like 64bit windows. As it happens though I have an old laptop running XP (purely to play Red Alert 2, sorry not DOS related), so copied DJGPP and the file I wanted to convert to a USB stick and moved everything over, and set the environment variables. Everything worked fine in XP, and the program ran in command prompt. I was pretty excited at this point, the last thing for me this evening was to get it to run in DOSbox at least. So after a bit of playing back in Windows 10 I discovered I needed to add in a DPMI host and it worked!
I know it’s not much, but it’s a lot more complicated than what I’ve been doing in RISC OS. I’m enjoying myself though and I’m looking forward to converting what I’ve learnt already in BASIC. I don’t have any real (DOS) hardware at the moment but I think it’ll definitely be on the cards at some point, I do fancy a 486 or maybe a socket 7. Certainly a lot cheaper than an Archimedes!
