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SECTION 6 - Protected Mode Programming
This document contains information that is most often provided
to users of this section. There is a listing of common
Technical Information Documents that can be downloaded from the
libraries, and a listing of the five most frequently asked
questions and their answers.
TI1184 Overview of Borland Pascal 7.0 and Turbo Pascal 7.0
TI1722 Declaring an array on the heap
TI1760 Creating a temporary stack in real or protected mode
TI1188 Creating protected mode apps with Borland Pascal
TI1171 Problem Report Form
TI1719 Booting Clean
NEWRTM.ZIP Latest RTM.EXE and DPMI16BI.OVL
PASALL.ZIP Collection of Technical Information sheets from
1986 on
EZDPMI.ZIP Unit encapsulating all common DPMI requirements for
protected mode programming
BIGSTU.PAS How to cope with memory allocations > 64K
MOUSE.ZIP General Purpose mouse unit for text/graphics mode
Q. "When using the BP7 IDE to compile a protected mode
application, how do I step through the code like I do with
real mode applications?"
A. To debug protected mode programs, you must use the external
debugger (TDX). You can put it on the TOOLS menu to make
it just a keystroke away.
Q. "When I convert a program from Real Mode to Protected Mode,
do I have to change the GetMem calls to GlobalAlloc and
GlobalDiscard?"
A. No, you don't have to change the GetMem calls. GetMem is a
better allocation method. Getmem will do a better job of
allocating memory. It allocates the memory in 8K chunks,
then suballocates from that. The reason for this is that
there are a maximum of 2000 selectors availble in BP7, so
you don't want to waste them. GlobalAlloc calls the DPMI
directly to allocate the memory, bypassing the heap manager.
GlobalAlloc is there for when you need to bypass the heap
manager for some reason, but you normally don't want to do
that.
Q. "How do I profile a protected mode application using BP7?"
A. You can only profile real mode applications, Borland does
not supply a protected mode profiler.
Q. "I have ported a large program to protected mode and am
getting a General Protection Fault on calls to GetMem. What
could be causing this?"
A. In DPMI, a Local Descriptor Table (LDT) can contain 8192
selectors. The Run Time Manager (RTM) maintains an
internal table to track allocated selectors. The RTM table
has a capacity of approximately 2K selectors. GlobalAlloc
and GetMem calls that need to allocate a new block will fail
when that 2K table is full.
Q. "I have a protected mode application that was created with
BP7. When running the program in a DOS box under Windows,
the computer locks up. What could be causing this?"
A. Check the "XMS KB Required" and "XMS KB Limit" settings in
the .PIF file used for the DOS box. The "Required" setting
should be 0 and the "Limit" should be at least 2048K.
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