Hardware upgrade killed my NTVDM!

[Vaelor 0]

Hey all. I upgraded my PC a few months ago, updated pretty much everything except my peripherals. I ghosted my OS over to the new HDDs to save reinstalling and messing around. I made a few slight tweaks and cleanups as I was doing so.

 

When I got around to installing my games again, I found that none of my 16 bit games will run anymore! Every single time I try to run any 16 bit game executable, I get this error:-

 

Code:

16 bit MS-DOS SubsystemX:\directory\subdirectory\executableorshortcut.exeThe NTVDM CPU has encountered an illegal instruction.CS:0008 IP:98a7 OP:0f 00 50 e8 91 Choose 'Close' to terminate the application.[ Close ]  [ Ignore ]

 

I've spent months troubleshooting this issue. I went through all the steps to debug the NTVDM, followed all the steps from Microsoft's tech docs, and so on. All the tests to see if the NTVDM is corrupt, work fine. COMMAND.COM loads fine. 16 bit Windows applications work fine. But when I want to play a DOS game, no dice.

 

Using VDMSound doesn't help, because it still relies on the NTVDM subsystem. DOSbox, which is pure emulation, works fine.

 

At first I thought it was something I changed when I ghosted my OS, so I did a clean reinstall, still didn't work. I then tried booting off a Windows XP UBCD, and even from the clean boot environment, exact same error, which proves it's the hardware itself and nothing on my OS setup.

 

I've had several friends and even hired "expert" technicians to look at it - nobody has even the slightest clue what's wrong or what to do about it.

 

These are the specs of the new system:-

• ASUS M2N-E NVIDIA nForce® 570 Ultra™ MCP Socket AM2 Motherboard
• AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 3600+ Dual-Core Socket AM2 CPU
• Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 675 (PC2 5400) Dual Channel SDRAM
• ...and some other stuff which is far less likely to be relevant.

Does anybody know of any issues in which this hardware could totally eradicate the NTVDM 16 bit subsystem of Windows 2000 and render it completely impossible to play any legacy games without the aid of pure emulation?

 

I know I can use DOSBox for my gaming if I have to, but I've always preferred VDMSound where possible, so if I can resolve this problem, it would be a huge load off this old gamer's mind! My hardware upgrade enabled me to play one game I couldn't play on my old system, but killed off several dozen of my favorite classics in the process! Not a fair tradeoff! =(

[DosFreak 2]

Does "edit.com" work?

 

Do you have any DOS games that use text mode? Try loading a roguelike and see if that works.

 

Text mode games usually run fine in an NTVDM console window so if those programs work then you know that you are able to play 16bit games.

 

If the above works but fullscreen does not then it's likely your video card drivers which are the culprit.

 

 

Your NTVDM error among tons of other NTVDM problems is one of the reasons why DosBox was created and why it's been recommended to use DosBox for quite some time.