

If your project must run in real mode (ie. Lots of other formats you probably don't care about.Windows 3.1 EXEs (with or without the Win386 extender).protected-mode EXEs (with your choice of several extenders).real-mode EXEs (there's a separate set of options to select minimum CPU requirement).OpenWatcom can target a lot of retro-platforms: (I use it to build various DOS and Windows test EXEs from Linux.) OpenWatcom can target all supported platforms from a single install. If you want to putter around with Windows 3.1 programming, OpenWatcom includes Win386, a 32-bit extender for Window 3.x which was used by companies like Sierra for their Windows 3.1 games before Microsoft produced their own "Win32s" 32-bit API addon. If you don't want nostalgia, OpenWatcom bundles newer, better alternatives to DOS/4GW, like DOS/32 and PMODE/W.


FREE C COMPILER X86 CODE
In fact, DOS/4GW's creator was trying to dig up the source code for a newer version of DOS/4GW to contribute to Open Watcom when he passed away. (When you see a game like DOOM saying "DOS/4GW Protected Mode Runtime" when it starts, that means that it was built using Watcom C/C++, because DOS/4GW is the special Watcom bundle version of DOS/4G.)
FREE C COMPILER X86 LICENSE
OpenWatcom still includes the free license to use DOS/4GW that made it so popular back in the day. No matter what you're trying to do, OpenWatcom (source) is likely to meet your needs. (Including a Turbo Vision port with an installation HOWTO) It's a protected-mode DOS port of GCC and probably has the largest selection of libraries and guides available of any of the open-source options. Here are a bunch of details others have missed:
