Reading debug information from DOS MZ executable

Question

I am trying to write an 8086 emulator + debugger. There is a lot information about writing first one, but nothing about second one. I need to read debug information that TASM includes in an MZ executable with commands tasm.exe /zi main.asm and tlink.exe /v main.obj (to show program listing). That information appends directly after opcodes in .exe file. Turbo debugger successfully reads this data and shows it. But how does it do that? How to implement such functionality?

Answer 1

The best source of information about Borland's TLINK/Turbo Debugger debugging information is probably the Borland Open Architecture Handbook (available in many places, e.g. here). It describes the updated, 32-bit supporting debug info (see "Symbol table format" section), but a lot of it still applies to 16-bit one.

Ralph Brown also has a short description of the header: http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/rbinter/it/24/16.html