Category Archives: DOS

The IHC Damage

Posted on June 14, 2011 by Michal Necasek

Trying to sort through a heap of floppy images recently, I found many of them to contain a suspicious ‘IHC’ signature in their boot sector in the location where an OEM identifier (such as ‘IBM  3.3’ or ‘MSDOS5.0’ would normally … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, Windows, Windows 95 | 5 Comments

Interrupt 68h and EMM386

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Michal Necasek

While working with a modified BIOS image in a virtual machine, I ran into mysterious hangs when trying to load an old version of EMM386.SYS from MS-DOS 4.01. A newer version of EMM386 did not exhibit the problem. A quick … Continue reading →

Posted in BIOS, DOS, Virtualization | Leave a comment

HIMEM.SYS, unreal mode, and LOADALL

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Michal Necasek

The previous post talked about real mode on 286+ processors which behaves more like a slightly modified variant of protected mode rather than the old 8088/8086 processors. Real mode with non-compatible selector bases or limits is usually called unreal mode … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, x86 | 4 Comments

The Importance of EMM386

Posted on August 4, 2010 by Michal Necasek

It is fairly obvious that Compaq’s Deskpro 386 changed the PC hardware and was probably one of the major reasons why we aren’t using PS/2 compatibles today. It may be less obvious that CEMM, an offshoot of the Deskpro 386 … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS | 4 Comments