1.Previous
3.Next

or Z80).

MS-DOS was designed to run on the Intel 8086 processor which could address sixteen different memory "segments", each of which held 65,536 bytes of memory. Since COM files were never intended to span multiple segments, Microsoft created a successor file format that allowed for larger programs: .EXE.

COM files in DOS set all x86 segment registers to the same value and the SP (stack pointer) register to the offset of

1.Previous
3.Next