Learning binary file formats (2003)

fasm is a very good assembler to start with, and I've used it a lot for various things over the years. Unfortunately one of the executable formats it's not able to generate (natively) is the 16-bit segmented protected-mode "NE" format (16-bit Windows), which forced me back to MASM for a recent project.

That said, like these posts show, it is possible to make fasm generate it "byte-by-byte" and perhaps macro-ise it for future use, although I had other constraints at the time which meant MASM was the easier choice.