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VMware Command Line Tools

Build Notes

Here are some notes about compiling/assembling VMware Command Line Tools from source files. Mostly it should be pretty straight forward if you have ever written a program yourself.

About C source files (WIN32)

• Executables in download packege are build with Digital Mars Free C/C++ Compiler only because it generates smaller executables than Microsoft Visual C++.
  You can compile them with MSVC without any modification.
  You may have to edit inline assembly parts to compile them with different compilers.
• You can build DOS16 executables from the same source files if the compiler/linker supports it (Digital Mars' compiler does). In fact before I decided to write DOS16 version in assembly language, both WIN32 and DOS16 versions shared the same sources.

About assembly source files (DOS16)

• They use a lot of MASM 6 specific directives and pseudo-codes so you may not be able to build them with other assemblers.
• Segment registers handling is completely omitted from all sources. Be sure to choose DOS tiny memory model when linking them.