pouët.net

Watcom compiled executables not working

category: offtopic [glöplog]
Man, that brings back some memories. Some good, many painful :D

Worse though was configuring non-PNP cards back then. Some were OK, others were a total nightmare. I remember a friend getting an audio card with built-in IDE, plus a CDROM drive. We spent a couple of days trying to get that bastard to work, with combinations of jumper settings on the card and on the motherboard. In the end he had to buy a separate IDE card :(
added on the 2013-07-16 09:58:53 by psonice psonice
Nice menu work Scali :)
added on the 2013-07-16 12:20:01 by raer raer
scali sweet....


i changed my cpu back to thefactory cpu. that's a intel 486sx-25, i upgraded it to a 486dx2-80 but it seems that cpu caused some problems. sx is a real sucker. :(
added on the 2013-07-16 16:35:59 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
so the cpu was the problem. i'll have to buy another cpu i guess...
added on the 2013-07-16 16:36:43 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
I set up a DOS demo machine a few months ago, and it was a painful experience. I didn't remember even half of the crap you had to go through. It's a totally sucky platform. For example, I had to saw off a piece of the chassis to make a GUS classic fit into the box, and then it refused to use any IRQ at all. Luckily, most demos only use plain dumb port I/O, so they don't care about GUS IRQ's. The whole AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS thing is something I would rather not have been reminded of, even with the menu features. And the 70Hz VGA modes are an entire category of suckiness. Currently I don't have a single device that can show 70Hz stuff properly. 20", 20kg CRT monitors anyone? Yeah, and the damn machine is too fast, so Crystal Dream II won't even start.

What was rather nice about the box was the CF-IDE hard drive, which is pretty fast and doesn't have any moving parts. (after I finally managed to find a CF card that actually works as a hard drive - too bad it was only 128MB)
added on the 2013-07-16 17:49:35 by yzi yzi
By the way, I must not have been clear. I know what a dos extender is, I wrote my flat real mode to poke vesa2lfb, lgdt and all, long ago, for what it's worth; I was just asking for the meaning of /4GW (4 evoked 'for' and GW reminded of gwbasic or whatever), and discovered that W is for watcom and that there also existed a /16M (wild guess, 286 64K pmode?).

If you wanted to debug your specific system, since it hangs with PMODE, you could recompile it and try and exhibit the crash, and add debug info. Tran released the source (http://qlibdos32.sourceforge.net/files.php). Maybe even it's in the watcom init sequence (reminds me of the pascal div by zero caused by some init thing that calibrated with delta time), or a combination of hardware peculiarities and software quirks that occur in rare circumstances. You could learn something :)
Or maybe your processor has one transistor fried :)

It's hard not to think himem/test=off is not normal; maybe it's related. You can tell by testing with your new cpu.
CRTs still are vastly superior to TFTs in some respects, namely response time and ghosting. And I mean, immensely.
However the hard truth is that they are also inferior in other aspects, that we micht have forgotten (saw that the other day), namely, color dynamic, crispness, flicker, and, hm, flatness. Going back to this is a painful reality check.
Besides, well, y'know, theres the, huh, weight.
helloworld, i think simply the problem is that the falty 486dx2 has some problems in protected mode.
added on the 2013-07-16 22:04:47 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
I am missing the good aspects of CRTs. Might buy one from used stores if I find. But nothing more than 15" I think.
added on the 2013-07-16 22:08:03 by Optimus Optimus
do you know of any really small CRTs, less than 10''?
added on the 2013-07-16 22:12:37 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
heading to my bed now.
added on the 2013-07-16 22:14:35 by MuffinHop MuffinHop
...su..."sucky" ? Blasphemy! To the arms, my brothers, he has attacked our beloved dos! Infidel! Infidel!

Seriously, as sucky as it today or then objectively was, first love shall know no reason. Besides, we had nothing better. I had nothing better.
It was my first computer system, it was the thing that did wonders, it was that thing that did games. Nothing will ever just be able to beat that. Those quirks are forever bound together with the indescriptible love, power, awe and amazement a kid would feel when using the system. The quirks being part of the system, their memories trigger the reminicenses of all wonders and mysteries that this thing had inside of it. The obscure idiosyncrasies are retrospectively just as part of the system as wolfenstein doom heretic or kyrandia. The learning of all these circonvoluted systems was a hard road, but just because of this it has played a part in leading me where I am today.
Earlier, people would feel that way for an amiga ; today a kid would love and worship a PS4, with good reason. There's an age of innocence and discovery that opens a window for sentimental attachment to first love, and it does not like to share that much; this window progressively closes after some time, when life moves on to more important things than a bunch of wires (or really?).

Dos, I love you.

Seeing config files still reminds me of good memories.

c:\>
Quote:
i changed my cpu back to thefactory cpu


The fact that you changed it at all would have been nice to know in the first post :-P
added on the 2013-07-17 06:21:20 by trixter trixter
Okay, I was not drunk but I'm ashamed now :). Oh well.
jumpered cards there quite easy to handle, hel started to break loose with the first plug&pray cards combined with window and the dreaded slot-specific shared pci irq holder mess...

so, how much free basemem do you have? ;D
added on the 2013-07-18 01:46:55 by T$ T$
he doesnt say anything about the graphics card he use. maybe he just compiles an hello world application in textmode (without knowing).

if the graphics card is borked or drivers it may cause specific watcom compiled executables to reboot/crash because of internal instruction pathways that may cause an interrupt crash.

if its the cpu and as someone have said compiler settings (which is doubtly the cause of the problem here since no watcom compiles executables) does execute.
added on the 2013-07-18 02:15:27 by rudi rudi
rudi, i have several vga-cards and i tested each one of them, they work just fine. i know my shit about vga.
added on the 2013-07-18 12:53:50 by MuffinHop MuffinHop

login