doytsujin / 123elf

A native port of Lotus 1-2-3 to Linux.

Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux

This is a native port of Lotus 1-2-3 version 3 to Linux. This is possible because the official Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX port used a technique called partial linking, which can be modified to support new platforms.

There's an article documenting how this is possible here.

Building

First, you need a version of binutils that is compiled with coff-i386 target support. You can check like this:

$ objdump --info | grep coff-i386

Note: Most distributions do not enable this for some reason.

Secondly, you need a copy of Lotus 1-2-3 for UNIX, you can download it here. Just place the raw disk images in the build directory and run extract.sh.

Finally, just run make.

Binutils

If you want to build binutils just for this purpose, just pass --enable-targets=all to configure.

If you don't want to override your system binutils, copy the new objcopy, objdump and ld into the build directory.

Important: ld must be called real-ld or gcc won't use it (I don't know why).

Now run PATH=.:$PATH make, and it should work.

Running

Copy the file l123set.cf to ~/.l123set, and run ./123.