Set DATE for vDOS, independent of system date?

[sapota]

Investigating use of vDOS for a legacy DOS app that's controlling medical / rehab devices. Legacy app has a date check that's failing if the perceived system date is after 2012 (I believe).

Any way to set date for the virtual DOS environment? Before updating AUTOEXEC or CONFIG, I tried the obvious DATE command, resulting in "NO CHANGE ALLOWED!".

Thanks in advance.

[Jos]

The vDos clock is that of Windows. So the option would be to (temporary) adjust that. Though that comes with possible side effects using Windows apps, like certificates that become invalid.

You could ask someone to patch the programs date check. But that would have some reason it’s limited to 2012 or so. For instance to store years in two digits as an offset to 1913. Or perhaps it was a millennium bug fix for 12 years?

You could try the RunAsDate program (https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/run_as_date.html). Never tried that, it seems the clock is made ‘static’ (not ticking) for a specific program? That will certainly not work with vDos as of version 2021. That relies on the GetSystemTime API call returning an increasing date/time. But you could give it a try with the current version.

Jos