[comp.sys.ibm.pc] DOS 4.00 / Turbo Pascal 4.0 - incompatibility?

d86-hsm@nada.kth.se (H}kan S|derbom) (10/13/88)

Reply-To: d86-hsm@nada.kth.se (Hakan Soederbom)
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

I am using IBM's new PS 50z models and am very pleased with the speed and
graphical performances, though I do have some problems with DOS 4.00
and its compatability with Turbo Pascal 4.0.

If anyone has solutions or comments on my problems and questions, please
mail me.

Equipment:
  Two PS 50z with: 80287, 1MB, 60MB HD, DOS 4.00, ( no shell in memory )
  One HD with one partition 60MB and
  one HD with two partitions ( C: 30MB, D: 30MB).

Development software:
  Turbo Pascal 4.0 (integrated environment)
  TDebug
  Turbo Asynch Manager

Developed sofware:
  A realtime, information gathering, simulation system.
  > 20' lines of source code.  >150 KB compiled code.
  Built up by about 30 units, each between 5 & 35 KB
  

Problems:
  i)     When compiling the program, the compiler breakes with the error
         message 'Critical Error - Bad Memory Image of FAT - Abort/Retry'. 
         And the FAT really is corrupted. I have to reformat the HD in
         order to get it boot properly. The error occurs on both machines,
         so the size of the HD-partition should not be the source of the
         trouble.

  ii)    The program is to big for TDEBUG since DOS 4.00 uses the memory
         between 640 - 1' KB for devicedrivers. Normally TDEBUG is able to
         use this memory for table savings. Any suggestions?


I guess that the new features in DOS 4.00 counts on the software to
follow some rules. Apparently TP manages to brake them.
Borlands software support was not able to help me since they do not 
use DOS 4.0 (!).

My temporary solution is to use DOS 3.30, with which everything runs ok.

A third PS 50z running the compiled program, but not the development
environment works well with DOS 4.00. On this machine however I have
problems running Symphony with large spreadsheets.

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