Category Archives: Watcom

Retro-Porting to NT 3.1

In another useless project, I decided to find out why even trivial programs created with the Open Watcom compiler refuse to run on Windows NT 3.1. Attempting to start an executable failed with foo.exe is not a valid Windows NT … Continue reading

Posted in Development, Microsoft, NT, Watcom | 12 Comments

Retro-Porting to OS/2 1.0

A few weeks ago I embarked on a somewhat crazy side project: Make the Open Watcom debugger work on OS/2 1.0. This project was not entirely successful, but I learned a couple of things along the way. The Open Watcom … Continue reading

Posted in Development, IBM, Microsoft, OS/2, Watcom | 10 Comments

Tracking Down a Bug

When I first encountered the Unix vi editor many years ago, I recoiled in horror. It was nothing like the editors I was used to—Borland IDEs, DOS 5.0/6.x EDIT, or OS/2 and Windows editors. But over the years, I learned … Continue reading

Posted in Debugging, Development, DOS, Watcom | 14 Comments

Windows 9x Video Minidriver Source Code

As promised, here is the source code for the Windows 9x VirtualBox display minidriver. For discussion of the source code, see the included readdev.txt file. The code was developed on a Windows 10 host system. For extra credit, I attempted … Continue reading

Posted in Development, Source code, VirtualBox, Watcom, Windows 95 | 18 Comments

Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+

The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox. The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The … Continue reading

Posted in Development, VirtualBox, Watcom, Windows 95 | 61 Comments

The Strange Case of GetEnvironmentStringsA

It was recently pointed out to me that a simple “hello world” style application built with Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 does not run on Win32s version 1.30, even though the same executable runs just fine on Windows NT 3.51, Windows … Continue reading

Posted in Development, NT, Watcom | 21 Comments

Complications, Complications

The other day someone asked how hard it would be to modify the Open Watcom linker, wlink, to properly support exports from IOPL segments in OS/2 LX modules. Not terribly hard it turned out, all it needed was to emit … Continue reading

Posted in Development, OS/2, Watcom | 2 Comments

Disabling Quick Edit Mode

Last week I decided to finally solve a minor annoyance that’s been pestering me since I switched my main development machine from Windows 7 to Windows 10 over a year ago. As it is with these things, a certain threshold … Continue reading

Posted in NT, Undocumented, Watcom | 22 Comments

Small World

The core of this story was originally a private e-mail, but I realized that it’s worth sharing with a slightly wider audience. Readers may know that I’m very interested in the history of PC development tools, especially C compilers, and … Continue reading

Posted in PC history, Watcom | 16 Comments

Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) Since 2012 or so Microsoft is pushing concept of running Windows Server headless without GUI and administering everything through PowerShell. I remember sitting through countless TechEd / Ignite sessions year … Continue reading

Posted in Editors, Microsoft, NT, Watcom | 15 Comments