Talk:Virtual Control Program Interface

The first sentence states the VCPI spec was published in 1989. The final sentence states the "Extended" VCPI (XVCPI) spec addressed some issues with the original spec "in the late 1980s." Are both of those time references accurate? If they are, maybe "later that same year" would be more apt for the final sentence. PlaysWithLife (talk) 07:54, 27 August 2011 (UTC)

XVCPI?
I removed the following unsourced paragraph from the article: "In the late 1980s an extended version of the specification XVCPI addressed some of these problems and was implemented or used by a small number of products including Interactive Unix and Digital Research operating systems." This has been flagged with "citation needed" for 1.5 years now and the original contributor in 2010 ([]) didn't respond to my query as well. Although there might have been proprietary extensions to the VCPI standard I am quite sure a standard named XVCPI never existed. It remains unclear, what could have been meant by this. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 18:54, 21 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I have reverted myself and expanded the XVCPI section since I found "Extended VCPI" and Intel briefly mentioned in the DPMI 1.0 specification. Mark was able to locate some information on the XVCPI API entry point (INT 67h AH=DEh, as VCPI, with currently known subfunctions AL=40h and AL=43h) and three involved companies (Digital Research with Concurrent DOS 386, Interactive Systems with Interactive Unix, and Viewport). This may help us to find more detailed and reliable information in the future. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 21:52, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

Software Examples?
Are there any software as example like games or application that did use VCPI DOS Extenders (not DPMI)? --IT-Compiler (talk) 02:53, 27 January 2022 (UTC)


 * I've got a (DOS) program that will test for VCPI and XVCPI, but I can't immediately think of anything that used either. The issue is that circa 1990 the overlap between people who used a PC multitasking OS and those who wanted to run large (by the standards or the day) application programs was vanishingly small, and by the time that Windows (in particular) had made a significant impact the various companies involved had tabled DPMI. I'd suggest that the best place to look would be example programs for the Phar Lap or AI Architects DOS extenders, or possibly the DOS extenders themselves... I can't remember whether the application programs had to know the details of the underlying software interface ("ABI" in today's terminology). MarkMLl (talk) 12:52, 20 March 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your answer. I did a little bit of research in the last couple of weeks and it seems to be, that the games "Privateer" and "Strike Commander" from Origin were some candidates, that did make use of VCPI. But i need still to check this. IT-Compiler (talk) 20:53, 20 March 2022 (UTC)

Grey Matter
I've removed mention of Grey Matter, since their involvement was as a software reseller rather than a publisher. They sold a comparatively small number of copies of CDOS and a much larger number of Desqviews and Windows-386s, but I don't recall being asked about or discussing VCPI in any detail: interactions were likely to be "this DOS extender is supposed to work with this OS" without drilling much deeper. MarkMLl (talk) 12:58, 20 March 2022 (UTC)