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Running Windows app from DosBox (This guy must be mad !!!)

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First post, by fcou95

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Hi guys,

I'm brand new to DOSBox and This forum, Hope I'll be respectuous of the general forum guidelines.

Not being English native, bare in mind if muy english is not perfect 😉

from the title, you might think I'm a crazy man, let me explain what I'm trying to achieve.

I developped 10 years ago business applications developped with clipper 5, running under DOS, then Win 3.1, XP...

The users of these apps are still using them, but now they are moving to windows 7 x64 / Office 2010, therefore my reason to look at DosBox.

So far so good, the application runs quite well under DosBox (some pieces may require tweaking anyhow)

so where's the issue ??? The DOS Clipper app calls (runs) Windows Office (Winword & Excel) from the DOS environment using the Overlay() Clipper 3rd party library. Goal is to perform mail merge using word type documents linked to Dbase files). Excel is using a macro based xls to use pivot tables out of dbase files).

The issue is that I cannot run a windows app such as office (true also for notepad ...) from DosBox ..

PS: I made a test of my app under Vista and it runs well in a native dos box and execs well Winword & Excel, it seems I have a chicken / egg problem with Windows 7

I appreciate my case is a bit weird but I'm clearly stucked at this stage

Any help will be much appreciated
Franck

Reply 2 of 3, by TeaRex

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Things running inside DOSBox cannot communicate directly to the outside system, but you can do it indirectly. For example you can create a file with a specific name in a specific place whenever you want the outside program to do something. Then you'd need to run a program in the "outer" system that watches for that file coming into existence, and does something as soon as it happens.

This isn't totally trivial to pull of correctly, as there are obviously race conditions to watch out for, but if your programming skills aren't too rusty I think you should be able to do it.

tearex

Reply 3 of 3, by peterferrie

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register a change notification in Windows in the directory that contains the dbase files;
create a file of actions to perform;
create another file when you finish writing the actions;
the change notification will receive control when the files are created, you can check if the "finished" file exists and then parse the actions file.
the Windows side must create a "complete" file after it finishes doing the actions;
you'll need the file in DOSBox to also wait for that "complete" file to avoid changing the actions list before they are all done.

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