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Borland's Turbo C 3's IDE

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First post, by Jet Nebula

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I've been running Borland's Turbo C 3 under Windows XP for a while. While it does work, there are some big enough annoyances (like 100% CPU usage) that I decided to look for alternative pseudo-platforms. DOSBox is the first I've tried.

Sadly, out of the box (no pun intended), DOSBox doesn't run the Turbo C IDE at all. I'll start DOSBox, mount the appropriate directories, set up the appropriate paths, and try to run tc.exe (the IDE). It does nothing--it's exaclty as if I hit enter at a blank prompt. Note that tcc.exe, the command line compiler, works fine, so this is an issue with the IDE specifically. However, I need to be able to use that IDE.

I've tried a couple of tweaks I read about in other threads--turning off EMS and XMS, lowering the amount of available memory, trying different CPU cores. None of that made any difference.

I've seen a couple of messages about the similar Turbo Pascal, but they weren't helpful. Anyone have experience running with Turbo C 3 and DOSBox?

Reply 1 of 9, by Qbix

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yeah. we know of it.
it acutally depends on the version of turbo C 3.
it's in the amount of memory turbo C 3 wants on startup. Dosbox can not provide that amount (no version of dos can actually) and dosbox cancels the execution of the ide.

Some debugging by kippesoep revealed that other dos implementations ands away a few bits of the amount of wanted memory. This way it fits.
therefore to get it running in dosbox you have at the moment to edit your exe header of tc.exe to use less pages. (100 pages total would be fine). Or you have to modify dosbox to and away the same bits as the other dos versions.
I will later this week probably add the fix to the CVS of dosbox (CVS is the public source archive of dosbox).

for the moment I would suggest changing the exe header. it's quite painless.

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 2 of 9, by Jet Nebula

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Thanks for the quick response!

Changing the exe header seems to have worked for me. Out of curiosity, why is 100 pages good enough? Would more pages be better (or fewer worse) in terms of performance after the program has loaded?

Reply 3 of 9, by Qbix

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well it's not a real dos executable.
in those 100 pages a loader is loaded which switches to protected mode and then loads the total executable.
the amount of pages is unrelevant (I think) as it switches to some protected mode. then memory is totally different. (and the loader will probably resize itself to a minimum)

Water flows down the stream
How to ask questions the smart way!

Reply 4 of 9, by msasha

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How would I edit the exe header? I've found documentation of the exe format at http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/doc/exe/ (and even tried to edit some of the fields, with no result) but don't know which field(s) to change. I've also compared TCC.exe with TC.exe, but all the suspect fields, which address memory usage seem to be identical.

Reply 5 of 9, by wd

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Are you using dosbox 0.65? I think the problem stated above is already fixed.
If something still doesn't work, please give as much details as possible.

Reply 6 of 9, by msasha

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No, I'm stuck with 0.63, as that's what Ubuntu distributes.

Reply 8 of 9, by msasha

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I know, I'd just rather not mess with the package system.

Reply 9 of 9, by wd

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Well then have fun messing around with TC3's executable headers.

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