In my ongoing quest of living on the edge in softice land, I have been trying to run the file compressor lha.exe (ver 2.13) under softice (ds32) in a DOS box. I'm not trying to reverse lha, or anything, I just want to watch it compress a file. I need to do that to learn how another app decompresses it. I have a ROM file that is AMI based and I have verified that it is compressed with LHA (lh5).

After loading the file with dldr.exe, everything is wonderfully stable till I try to execute an INT 21 with eax = 4A (modify allocated memory). The first time, it caused the app to run to completion but the next couple of times I got a BSOD with stop 0x000000c1 and a SPECIAL_POOL_DETECTED_MEMORY_CORRUPTION error. Looking that up I got this from Msoft:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms795963.aspx

The app, lha.exe, runs fine in a DOS box by itself, so softice must be causing the problem. I read somewhere that softice for Windoze is supposed to be able to run apps in a DOS box.

My only alternative is booting up softice 2.8, or thereabouts, but that raises other questions. For example, what's the best DOS environment to run that version in? I tried on VMWare under DOS 6.22 with softice 2.62, but the VM complained about a corrupt stack, or something.

Fiddled around with different versions and finally got 2.8 running smoothly in VMWare under DOS 6.22. It did not crash on INT 21 as a later version of softice did in a DOS box under XP.

Used emmsetup with s-ice.exe and chose both expanded and extended memory. Pure vanilla otherwise...nothing in config.sys...no himem.sys or emm386.

It's a neat little debugger, not nearly as sophisticated as the newer softice versions, but a heck of a lot better than debug and more stable than Borland's turbodebugger. Ideal for small DOS apps like lha.exe.

with what versions of softice you worked yet ? i remember on 98 times a lot protectors causing massive bsodīs if they detect softice
on xp this happend less to me but still sometimes maybe not on purpose
i think software like "kaspersky" do on purpose or also "nprotect" software

I'm using version 2.8 for DOS in a VM. I have it working OK now but it's so old that protectors like yours wont work. There are some protectors available for that version but protection is not an issue.