This is not from 2003. The date on the posts is 2018.
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.
My original title - "Learning binary file formats (work in progress) from flat assembler Author". Someone edited it and I can't change title anymore looks like. :-)
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.