Strange characters in TIME$ in QB in DOSbox (Linux vs. dos)

Question

I have been using VBdos (QB dialect) in DOSbox and have found the Time$ is no longer maxed out at 23:59:59 but instead returns hours as

99:59:59

which I cannot parse. I am fudging it instead with S$=Format$(Now,"hh:mm:ss")

In fact, after leaving machine online for 4 days w/o suspend/sleep the date$ returns boot date and dos returns current date: that is 09-02-2019 in linux as opposed to today: 09-05-2019 which is not a problem. So, anyway, my question is that linux time$ is returned as hh:mm:ss where sometimes the hours are ;8:00:00 and sometimes >8:00:00 and sometimes =8:00:00 and I would like to know why??

Answer 1

The solution to this problem is in C:\Dosbox-x\Dosbox-X.conf where

synchronize time = true

sets the clock to the current host. And traps midnight clock roll-over.

Answer 2

Sounds like a bug in the BASIC interpreter you're using.

The ASCII characters which follow 9 are :, ;, <, =, >, ?, and @, followed by the uppercase letters. My suspicion is that the interpreter is using these characters as if they were digits higher than 9 -- ;8 is probably meant to be 118, for instance.