"This program has performed an illegal operation"

[HL3isComing]

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this for a game I was trying to load within the Windows95 application?

Managed to mount the files and install them within Windows, but now it's giving me the "This program has performed an illegal operation" error when I try and load the .exe.

I know it's most likely the game itself, but I thought I'd ask. The game has worked on other machines in the past, so it might be this application not allowing it for some reason.

Cheers.

[pabru]

I would say that's loading anything within this copy of Windows 95 is technically performing an illegal operation, given the copyright status of the contents within the virtual machine image. This issue should be closed "working as designed".

/joke

[ITAC85v2]

Same thing happened to me, but with explorer.exe, then logonui.exe, and then it BSoDs. I hit the button to discard and load fresh install, it fixed, except the registry had an error do to insufficient memory.

Can anybody help me fix this?

[garettridge]

I'm seconding the "illegal operation from a successfully installed program" question in the original post, wondering if there's anything about this particular windows image, or the nature of the emulated CPU, that might prevent certain games/programs from being run.

I understand that a lot of programs back in the day used ill-advised performance hacks, overly depending on hardware quirks of the time that don't exist anymore. If that's the issue for a certain program then there's nothing that can be done short of re-writing it, but I am hoping that someone might have a second possible reason why this could happen that might be easier to solve.

Within Windows 95, my program installs without an error message, but will not run from the resulting executable -- "illegal operation" and "executed an invalid instruction in module OLE2DISP.DLL". I had successfully installed the application by following the instructions to re-compile windows95 from source using an image file that I added contents to.

Like user @seajaysec from issue #25 the program I chose to install was MSBOB (Microsoft Bob). That user claimed success and did not mention getting this error, but there might be a reason why they show no screenshots of MSBOB that go past the installer. I don't know of any other way to run Bob in modern times; even the VM route supposedly has trouble. For reference, I'm running all this on Ubuntu 20.04.