Category Archives: NT

Retro-Porting to NT 3.1

Posted on July 26, 2023 by Michal Necasek

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

NT video miniport UHD

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Michal Necasek

I’ve finally managed to update the previously released NT video miniport. The reason for the update was indirect, hacking up the video “hardware” access code to support other environments. That led me to separate the generic mode set code from … Continue reading →

Posted in NT, VirtualBox | 1 Comment

The Strange Case of GetEnvironmentStringsA

Posted on May 22, 2022 by Michal Necasek

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 | 22 Comments

Disabling Quick Edit Mode

Posted on December 18, 2020 by Michal Necasek

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

The Answer To 0x49: Fujitsu FMR

Posted on December 11, 2020 by Michal Necasek

This is a guest post by A. N. Other. The following was originally intended as a comment to “Not MSX Either“, the 4th installment in the hunt for the mysterious 0x69 FAT VBR-start byte which was allowed in DOS. Due … Continue reading →

Posted in DOS, NT, PC hardware, PC history, Undocumented | 7 Comments

Microsoft Editor

Posted on March 11, 2018 by tenox

(This is a guest post by Antoni Sawicki aka Tenox) In a recent blog post I lamented the lack of a good console/cmd/PowerShell text editor for Windows. During the process I made a rather interesting discovery, that in a fact … Continue reading →

Posted in Development, DOS, Editors, Microsoft, NT, OS/2, Source code, Uncategorized | 23 Comments

Wanted: Console Text Editor for Windows

Posted on February 16, 2018 by tenox

(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 | 16 Comments

Bad NTAS ISO

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Michal Necasek

This might save someone a bit of head scratching… Several times, I tried to install Windows NT Advanced Server (NT 3.1 server) straight from CD-ROM (well, ISO) into a clean VM. The installation failed every time, asking for a nonexistent … Continue reading →

Posted in Debugging, NT | 33 Comments

More CPUs in NT 3.x Workstation

Posted on January 22, 2016 by Michal Necasek

The default processor limits of Windows NT 3.x are surprisingly difficult to establish. Quite possibly because although SMP was a big selling point of NT, in reality only a tiny fraction of PCs in the mid-1990s supported SMP, and of those, … Continue reading →

Posted in NT, Software Hacks | 3 Comments

Windows NT 3.1 (and OS/2) Memory Detection

Posted on January 15, 2016 by Michal Necasek

It is common knowledge that Windows NT 3.1 only recognizes up to 64 MB RAM, unlike NT 3.5 and later versions. This statement can be found in various places, including this blog. The limitation was empirically determined by installing NT … Continue reading →

Posted in BIOS, NT | 39 Comments