It has come to our attention that it may be close to the "End of the Road" for the IMS/ACTR/ACTP system.  The code used by IMS/CATR/ACTP was originally developed in the early 1980's using a 8088 CPU and instruction set.  Up until recently new CPU's and operating systems have always been downward compatible and have not presented any significant problems.

We have already discovered that IMS/ACTR/ACTP will NOT run under Windows XP and/or Windows 2000.  It will also not run on some Compaq computers.  We have never made the effort to find out why, but it may be fro the same reasons as follows in the remainder of this article.

Recently an existing IMS/ACTR/ACTP user did a hardware upgrade and discovered that the new hardware would not run the IMS/ACTR/ACTP software even when using a Windows 98 operating system.  When executed, the program terminated  with a "This program has performed an illegal operation" error.  After some rather extensive testing we discovered that this applies to almost all Pentium 3, Pentium 4 and higher Intel CPU's.  We have no experience with other manufactures CPU's and would appreciate feedback from users who are running this software on new hardware.

Our testing indicated that the problem is caused by specific commands.  To remove these commands from IMS/ACTR/ACTP would be a very difficult task, and we have no way of knowing if other commands are affected now or in the future.  We have decided that we will NOT be doing any code upgrades to make this software compatible with these new CPU's. 

Shop Trac does not (an probably will not) have this problem.  Since the remaining IMS/ACTR/ACTP users are few in number we would encourage them to upgrade to Shop Trac, especially if upgrading to new hardware.