Troubleshoot runtime error 200
A runtime error 200 message usually occurs with old DOS applications written in Turbo and Borland Pascal. Turbo Pascal had a timing bug that would cause its complied programs to crash when they were operating on machines running at 200Mhz or faster. It is known as the CRT unit issue and can be fixed by applying a patch to the effected application. Otherwise you can run the application in DOSBox which can artificially slow down the speed of the emulated DOS session.
If you wish to patch the application we have created a guide to help you through it. Though this is only recommended for people experienced with DOS or the Windows command prompt.
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Download UNP 4.11 A Turbo Pascal decompression program.
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Download CRTFix 1.16 A CRT bug patching program.
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Create a temporary directory.
MKDIR C:\TPATCH -
Unzip both downloaded packages into the temporary directory.
PKUNZIP TurboPascal-Unpack.zip C:\TPATCH PKUNZIP crtfix16.zip C:\TPATCH -
In our example we are going to patch defacto.exe which is the binary from an early Defacto magazine that suffers from this bug. So run the UNP program to decompress the binary.
UNP DEFACTO.EXE -
Once the decompression is complete run the crtfix program to patch the binary.
CRTFIX DEFACTO.EXE
That is it, if the crtfix returned a Fixing code... Fixed. response then the binary is now patched and in future those annoying runtime error 200 messages should be gone.