who had problems with win nt4.0 ntvdm

Michael Zandstra

Delphi Developer

Wed, 18 Jun 1902 08:00:00 GMT

who had problems with win nt4.0 ntvdm

NT is besides an better structured OS (following a lot of people) also very
conserned with what happens to the pc.... It checkes what program is calling
for hardware... If you want to use a mouse for example in you program it won't
even work or you'll get error-messages like these... sollution... stay away
from NT... it really won't allow an DOS-program to access the hardware like
pascal often wants

Quote

RD wrote:
> i have a pascal-program running perfectly under dos, win31, win95 etc.

> but producing "NTVDM-CPU illegal instruction detected" under windows nt 4.0
> sp3

> any idea?

> thank you
> ROMBert

> rdietr...@olioid.de

Arsène von Wys

Delphi Developer

Wed, 18 Jun 1902 08:00:00 GMT

Re:who had problems with win nt4.0 ntvdm

Michael Zandstra <mi...@dds.nl> schrieb im Beitrag
<3759A72D.A2809...@dds.nl>...

Quote

> NT is besides an better structured OS (following a lot of people) also very
> conserned with what happens to the pc.... It checkes what program is
calling
> for hardware... If you want to use a mouse for example in you program it
won't
> even work or you'll get error-messages like these... sollution... stay away
> from NT... it really won't allow an DOS-program to access the hardware like
> pascal often wants

Nah... I'd say like the Pascal *programmer* wants. Of course direct hardware
access if often prohibited by Windows NT, but on the other side this is also
a good criteria to keep the system stable. An application is not allowed to
do so much "damage" through direct hardware access ("damage" could already be
accessing the unprotected serial or parallel port since they are in use by
the operating system). It can also be nice to just restart TP/BP after some
program crash instead of restarting the whole system.

NT simulates the serial and parallel ports, the VGA and keyboard controller,
and some interrupts (including DOS, BIOS, Mouse), making quite a lot of the
DOS programs work!

Note that the same limitations are valid for virtually all platforms which
allow direct access to assembler code or hardware, no matter if it is C, C++,
Basic...

Just my 2c...

--
Arsne von Wyss - avonw...@gmx.net
Pascal, Delphi & Personal stuff: http://bsn.ch/avonwyss
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