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From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: rec.games.hack,comp.sources.bugs
Subject: Re: Help w/ NETHACK & MSC v4.0
Message-ID: <1079@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Sep-87 17:16:41 EDT
Article-I.D.: bsu-cs.1079
Posted: Tue Sep  1 17:16:41 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 3-Sep-87 06:10:42 EDT
References: <616@hadron.UUCP> <3470@zen.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 23
Xref: utgpu rec.games.hack:1210 comp.sources.bugs:232
Summary: Microsoft uses 16-byte units

In article <3470@zen.berkeley.edu> iverson@cory.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Tim 
Iverson) writes (about setting a stack for hack.exe under MSDOS):

>I tried stacks up to 64k, but I always
>got the same lack of stack space.  Then I tried smaller stacks - and guess
>what?  It worked!  The limit is somewhere between 0a00 and 0b00 (a00 works
>fine, but b00 doesn't).  If someone out there understands exactly why it
>works with a small stack but not a large one, I'd really like to know.

A lot of things under MS-DOS are measured in units of 16-byte clicks.
Thus, when you specify a stack of 0xa00 bytes, you may be really
specifying 0xa00 clicks, which is 0xa000 bytes or 40 kilobytes.  Since
the stack segment can't exceed 64 kilobytes, specifying too large a
stack will cause overflow.  Unfortunately, the Microsoft linker doesn't
seem to give a warning when this happens, and just seems to use some
unknown value instead.

Also note that, depending upon the memory model and the options you
specify to the compiler, the stack may share a segment with static
(non-stack) data, limiting the stack itself to less than a full
segment.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  {ihnp4,seismo}!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi