Category Archives: Windows

Windows NT BSOD Aclock Port

Posted on November 7, 2012 by tenox

Do you remember the famous Windows NT Blue Screen Of Death? For years it was a source of jokes and bad reputation of Windows reliability. There even was a Blue Screen Saver! Today we fortunately see much less of it, but it … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Development, NT, Uncategorized, VGA, Windows, x86 | 2 Comments

Windows Update Fail

Posted on October 6, 2012 by Michal Necasek

The other day I needed to update a server blade with Windows Server 2008 R2 installed on it. The system hadn’t been running for a while and now had about 100 updates available. I wasn’t looking forward to this as … Continue reading →

Posted in Microsoft, Windows | 7 Comments

On a dark, rainy night in April 1985…

Posted on July 7, 2012 by Michal Necasek

When researching the history of computing, from time to time an unexpected gem turns up. The copy of Ray Ozzie’s notes from a 1985 meeting with Microsoft is one of such gems. Between 2006 and 2010, Ray Ozzie was the chief … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Microsoft, Windows | 34 Comments

Watcom Win386

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Michal Necasek

When Windows 3.0 came out in 1990, the press loved it and users bought it in droves. Unfortunately, technically it was at best a step sideways, and Windows 3.0 was the cause of many sleepless nights for application developers. Even … Continue reading →

Posted in 386, Development, Windows | 5 Comments

From a Feature to a Bug

Posted on April 6, 2012 by Michal Necasek

Sometimes the quest for backwards compatibility has unintended consequences. In some cases, the presumably beneficial backwards compatibility turns into a source of problems. The costs end up far outweighing the benefits, yet the “feature” may be difficult to get rid … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, PC history, Windows | 13 Comments

AVX support disrupts WoW64 debugging

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Michal Necasek

Sometimes, the old and the new intersect in unexpected ways. After upgrading to a Sandy Bridge based system (Core i7) and Windows 7 SP1 64-bit some time ago, I noticed that debugging exceptions in 32-bit user programs didn’t quite work … Continue reading →

Posted in Windows, x86 | 17 Comments

LAN Manager vs. Windows 7

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Michal Necasek

I recently spent some time trying to access disks shared by a Windows 7 machine from various versions of OS/2 (running in VMs, although that’s not really relevant). The OS/2 clients ranged from OS/2 1.3 with LAN Manager 2.1 (1991 … Continue reading →

Posted in Networking, OS/2, Windows | 4 Comments

Undocumented VflatD

Posted on February 23, 2012 by Michal Necasek

The virtual flat framebuffer driver, or VflatD, was introduced in Windows 95 in order to ease development of display drivers. It was surprisingly poorly documented and the sample drivers did not illustrate its use very well. A short backgrounder may … Continue reading →

Posted in Documentation, VGA, Windows | 2 Comments

How to please WDCTRL

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Michal Necasek

As any user of 16-bit Windows knows, Microsoft Windows 3.1x in 386 Enhanced mode supported a coveted feature called 32-bit disk access (sometimes also called FastDisk). The “32-bit” designation was slightly misleading as there was no 32-bit data path to … Continue reading →

Posted in BIOS, Windows | 3 Comments

Retro development with aclock

Posted on January 29, 2012 by Michal Necasek

In the past few days, I embarked upon a project to port Antoni Sawicki’s aclock, a small text-based clock program (aclock stands for analog clock), to 16-bit Windows. While aclock itself has been ported to over 150 platforms, it is a … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, PC history, Windows | 10 Comments