MKS_VIR - old dos anti-virus program freezes on dosbox \ VOGONS

MKS_VIR - old dos anti-virus program freezes on dosbox

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First post, by krzysiobal

Posted on 2011-02-03, 19:21

krzysiobal Offline

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Hi there,
There is a very old polish antivirus program (called MKS_VIR) for DOS. Its value is not that it detect viruses, because it was created in '90 and its databases are out of date, but because it has built-in virus lexicon. It consists of very good descriptions of many viruses. Those viruses created in the '80 and '90 (for DOS 1.0, 2.0, etc) had built-in speccial effects (like playing some songs on PC-Speaker, displaying various things on screen, rotating the font, etc) that were shown to the user for example on anniversaries. The examples of those demos are available to see in this program.

The author of this software was a tallented Polish programmer - Marek Sell (He is not alive now).

Howewer, running this program on DOSBOX fails - after running it tries to scan memory for the presence of viruses and hangs on the screen and waits forever. Is this a dosbox bug? I think this program can do some unconventional things with processor and/or memory so that might be the reason.

Szukam wirusow zainstalowanych w pamieci operacyjnej komputera
>>METODA ALGORYTMICZNA<<

in translation from Polish means

Searching for virusses installed in computer memory
>>ALGORITHMIC METHOD<<

Im publishing this program for download.

regards[/img]

Reply 1 of 6, by krzysiobal

Posted on 2012-01-19, 11:16

krzysiobal Offline

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Hello!
I found out accidentally that running this app with /m parameter skips the memory check and it runs!

However, there's one virus in the program's lexicon called `Deliver Stealth` and it demonstrates some kind of animation. Unfortunatelly it is glitchy in dosbox - looks like that:

But it should be:

Can any of dosbox's expert express their opinion?
This program definitely uses come non-conventional DOS methods for screen displaying.

(The background is filled with animating bars - they're changing colour from red to gray) However, in dosbox it is rather the whole background in one solid colours than bars and the big `DIGI POWER` text is glitched.

Reply 2 of 6, by keropi

Posted on 2012-01-19, 12:41

keropi Offline

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I remember a similar program found on a magazine here , 1992-1994 period... it had live examples like this one and I spent quite some time remembering what it was called 🤣
thanks for sharing this 😁

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Reply 3 of 6, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 2012-01-19, 13:57

ripsaw8080 Offline

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The "DIGI POWER" part is rendered correctly when loading a video bios in DOSBox. The difference appears to be that INT 43h is pointing at the 8x8 font in mode 3 in real video bioses, but DOSBox's emulated video bios has it pointing at the 8x16 font. The RBIL does seem to suggest that DOSBox has it right, but it's not super clear, and the real bioses are evidence to the contrary. At any rate, it works correctly when DOSBox is modified to point the vector at its 8x8 font.

The color banding appears to be changing the palette in sync with video timing (horizontal retrace) such that bands appear. Not sure if DOSBox can handle that kind of thing. I know hal had to do some work to implement similar behavior for Jungle Hunt and Frogger in CGA.

Reply 4 of 6, by VileR

Posted on 2012-01-19, 14:27

VileR Offline

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the background scrolling bars effect works on SVN builds like MB6 / ykhwong's, if you set the config option linewise=true.

the text is still broken, however - screenshot attached...

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Reply 5 of 6, by ripsaw8080

Posted on 2012-01-19, 15:22

ripsaw8080 Offline

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Yeah, 8x16 font data doesn't work too well when it's expecting 8x8 font data. The attached program changes INT 43h to what the program expects, if you really want to see it.

Reply 6 of 6, by VileR

Posted on 2012-01-19, 16:06

VileR Offline

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Oops, didn't notice your previous post before posting mine... I should've recognized those sliced-up 8x16 chars. 😀

confirmed - the TSR works fine.

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