I’ve been lately trying to understand and improve the idling behavior of DOS programs and one of my guinea pigs has been the Open Watcom vi editor. While the 16-bit real-mode DOS variant of the editor idles nicely, the 32-bit …Continue reading→

The other day I set out to solve a seemingly simple problem: With a DOS extended application, lock down memory buffers using DPMI and use them for bus-mastering (BusLogic SCSI HBA, though the exact device model isn’t really relevant to …Continue reading→

A Few Decades Late Book Reviews Unauthorized Windows 95 Developer’s Resource Kit, by Andrew Schulman IDG Books, November 1994; 593 pages, ISBN 1-56884-305-4; $39.99 A testimony to the incredible level of hype surrounding Microsoft’s “Chicago”, Unauthorized Windows 95 was published nearly a year before …Continue reading→

Recently I had a need to test the behavior of floating-point exceptions (FPEs) in environments where traditional FPE reporting is used. To briefly recap, in the original PC equipped with an 8088/8087 pair, floating-point exceptions, which are generally asynchronous events, were …Continue reading→