Slightly OT: DOS programs in Win XP

From: Jules Richardson <julesrichardsonuk_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Tue Jan 4 06:49:36 2005

On Tue, 2005-01-04 at 06:14 -0500, Steve Thatcher wrote:
> win2K and on will not allow any hardware direct access to hardware. In the DOS days,
> programs "talked" directly to display cards to bypass BIOS or expected to load
> their own memory manager (that is the Phar Lap error you are receiving). There are
> a lot of console programs that will work just fine on XP as long as they access
> normal BIOS and DOS system calls. AutoCAD is not in that category...

My memory on that one is that Autocad uses the same loadable video (and
hardcopy) drivers as 3DStudio did - now I *think* the solution there for
3DS under Windows was just to set it to use the VESA driver; Windows
could intercept VESA calls and do the necessary emulation.

Not as fast as talking direct to hardware, but of course you're running
the app on hardware that's many times faster than what was around when
the app was current, so it doesn't actually matter.

ps. there was some patch for 3DS floating around to get it to run on
Pentium-class CPUs at proper speed; 3DS was written in the days of the
486 and for some reason slowed to a crawl on a Pentium without the
patch. May well be that Autocad has the same problem...
Received on Tue Jan 04 2005 - 06:49:36 GMT