Get the BIOS Date Via Direct Memory Access (Win 95/98)

Category:

System/API

Type:

Snippets

Difficulty:

Advanced

Author:

Arkadiy Olovyannikov

Version Compatibility: Visual Basic 5

More information:

VB runtime libraries (msvbvm50(60).dll) allow direct access to a memory address. Using them, you can read data directly from memory. Unfortunately, you can not access some memory addresses (BIOS addresses for example) under NT/2000.

As noted above, this code is for Windows 95/98 only. Using this example on NT/2000 will cause your application to crash.

Instructions: Copy the declarations and code below and paste directly into your VB project.

Declarations:
Option Explicit Private Declare Sub GetMem1 Lib "msvbvm50.dll" (ByVal _ MemAddress As Long, var As Byte) 'You can read Integer (2 bytes), Long and LongInteger variables 'using GetMem2, GetMem4 and GetMem8 functions 'Private Declare Sub GetMem2 Lib "msvbvm50.dll" (ByVal _ ' MemAddress As Long, var As Integer) 'Private Declare Sub GetMem4 Lib "msvbvm50.dll" (ByVal _ ' MemAddress As Long, var As Long) 'API has LongInteger var type 8 bytes long (FileTime is a _ ' sample), VB has not

Code: