MASM : Java Glossary

Microsoft’s assembler for the Athlon/Pentium/80x86 class CPUs (Central Processing Units) is called MASM. The assembler ml.exe 9.0 comes bundled with the free Visual C++ Express. For writing DOS utilities, you probably want an older 16-bit DOS ml.exe 6.15. You can download it and extract the needed pieces with WinZip. You will want the corresponding link.exe 5.6. You can download it and extract the needed pieces with WinZip. Newer versions are not compatible with the older ones. To use a more recent assembler, you have to make some fairly drastic changes to your code.

Most assembler was 16-bit written in the DOS days and perpetuated to Windows. It was often augmented with long file names to work under W95, W98, Me, NT, W2K and XP. It no longer works in Vista, W2008, W7-32, W7-64, W8-32, W8-64, W2012, W10-32 and W10-64. There is small amount of 32-bit assembler about but I have yet to see 64-bit assembler. That sort of work is done in C now-a-days.