
Hacking Clarion for DOS 2.1 Protection!
Hi Gordana
You probably have problematic BIOS in your PC, but don't lose hope.
Successfully replacing BIOSes on older MBs, like some folks suggested in
responses to your question, is quite suspicious as manufacturers
probably cut their production long time ago. There is, however, another
possible solution.
Most BIOSes on MBs manufactured after 1992-3 behave on 1999/2000 border
like this:
if the computer was shut down in 1999, turned off and left until 2000
and then turned on, BIOS clock will show 4-Jan-1980 after restating.
If you now manually set date to, say, 2-Jan-2000 or whatever the new
date is (entering _four_ digits for year 2000), BIOS will continue
tracking date and time _correctly_, and will keep it even after PC being
shut down / restarted, like nothing happened at all. The date and time
should be entered presumably from MS-DOS, don't involve Windows in this
operation (but even Windows 9x should work properly afterwards!)
This (quite strange) behaviour was verified in my firm RTS on more than
two hundred older PCs with various BIOSes (many of them still running
Clarion 2.1 apps), which kept functioning properly in 2000 after being
treated this way.
Even if this doesn't help (an ancient BIOS, date setup is lost after
shutdown/restart), there's probably still another solution to circumvent
the problem. Simply let the user enter date and time on every startup
(include appropriate DOS commands in your AUTOEXEC.BAT). If the BIOS
doesn't reject entering date higher then 01/01/2000, it will keep
running w/o problem until next shutdown, which is acceptable as a
solution.
Good luck and regards
Zoran Bujandric