Virus infected image under WHDLoad

[mailman]

Today I was thinking about such a possible situation. Let's imagine that I have a virus infected executable. It is stored on a diskette. I created an image of that diskette and managed to run it under WHDLoad using generic slave. Executable was run so the virus which was linked to that executable became resident in the memory. After quitting WHDLoad would it still be contagious for the rest of the system or is it only dangerous "inside WHDLoad emulation"?

I ask because recently I have been checking a lot scene ADFs which worked under WHDLoad. I didn't bother to check them for viruses and fortunately nothing in my system is infected. So this is much more out of curiosity.

[Wepl]

starting whdload v16.9 the installed program cannot access (read/write) files outside the games (data) directory
in earlier whdload versions all files on the whole system could be written, but a for a virus to do this:
- must know about whdload
- must get the resload pointer to access whdload function which is usually stored in the slave
- must become active somehow and call resload functions

in your case, running the generic kickemu, the virus will only see the emulated aos and nothing of whdload
a old virus could infect other files in the data directory as long as no unsupported io functions (e.g. Rename) are used but not files outside

a new virus made to support whdload could infect all files before whdload v16.9, after this it would be only possible by modifying whdload itself

conclusion: if you download a whdload installed game from somewhere there is the same risk that your system gets infected as with any other downloaded program you execute
I hope nobody wastes his time on such developments.... better fix demos/games.

[mailman]

Thanks for reply. I was thinking that it would not make much sense if the files executed within WHDLoad could do some damage to the real system but I needed some confirmation.