I figured that different assemblers come with different linkers, even they all support the very same masm syntax. I'm not sure if the Irvine libraries require a little tweaking for each of these because none of them came with the Irvine libraries. But since most if not all masm assemblers work only on windows platforms, I used the Visual C++ to assemble my masm programs. I got the Irvine libraries plus a visual studio project file to ease my setting up procedures from this web page. The website contains all info that you need about setting up your project just before you start the programming itself. The beauty of visual studio is that, all you need to do is just
include Irvine32.inc
or
include Irvine16.inc
etc, then write your source code. You don't need to think about the Irvine32.lib or Irvine16.lib. Then you just click on run or start without debugging button and you're good to go. This saves you a lot of work and it doesn't take long to set up.
Cheers!