x86 Assembly on Mac OS X

Quicksilver31337 asks: "I am currently taking an Assembly course which requires that I be able to compile ASM for the intel x86; however, I am stubbornly a Mac user. Having no desire to switch from my Powerbook, what can I do to work with, compile, and run x86 ASM short of running VirtualPC?" While Mac OS X does use gcc and its associated tool-chain, an old Slashdot discussion seems to imply that cross-compiling is better under OpenDarwin than Mac OS X. Has anyone tried cross-compiling under both operating systems? If so, what suggestions on setting up a working tool-chain do you have?

Comments

Some sound advice has already been given..

[ciroknight]

You've got the option of either Emulation or new hardware, as quoted by everyone on here. But there is probably a better way than both. Ask your teacher at your school if there's a box available in the IT department that's the correct archetecture. Like, for example, I am also a vehement mac user, and I had a project that required me to use assembly (mainly SSE-related things). Since I didn't know assembly for the PPC yet, I asked my professor and he said to get an account with the school's super computer. So I did, I wrote the software, and got an A on the project. Simple as that. VNC is your friend.

Qemu.

[drdink]

First, a note to Cliff. Assembly has nothing to do with cross-compiling. When you write assembly for the PowerPC 970, it stays on the PowerPC 970. You can't cross-compile assembly because it is designed for the target platform from the start.

Now, what I would suggest you do is get a copy of QEMU. I assume you are familiar enough with Terminal and the shell prompt to get it working since you're stepping into the world of assembly, but if all else fails you can get QemuX or some other QEMU GUI off of VersionTracker.

Depending on what mode you're writing your assembly in, you'll need to install some sort of OS into QEMU. Some candidates are FreeDOS, MS-DOS, or even Linux. Use whatever your class is using. Emulators are very handy for writing assembly because you can debug the program at the "CPU" level, so when your program pukes you can get a better glimpse at what is going on. This is why many developers design inside of VMWare.

I hope this helps!

My assembly course

[generationxyu]

...was in MIPS. I don't own a MIPS box, nor would it be easy for me to find one. It wasn't expected that we had one. We were expected to use spim/xspim/PCSpim. I ran xspim on my Mac and it was fine. The programs probably ran like a snail crawling through molasses in January in comparison to a real box, but I never noticed -- none of my programs took long enough to execute anyway.