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First post, by ThemoKenwood

Posted on 
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Hey everyone,
I've started at a new workplace 2 months ago and the infrastructure is/was very outdated, we're talking Windows XP SP 3 on most machines, Windows 7 on the PC of my boss. Now, there is this rather old program that has been used here for 30 odd years with no support staff available anywhere anymore.
My boss is over 70 years old and is used to this kinda database management program and doesn't wanna get rid of it. Together with his successor I'm currently working on a general overhaul of the infrastructure, but the old guard wanna continue using their old database management.

Since the 16-bit based program (starts via a batch-file, that redirects to a .mnu aka a menu-file in which you select which .exe to run aka which database to manage) doesn't run on Win 7 64-bit I thought of using DOSBox. If i mount the drive and want to run the .bat I get the (freely translated from German) Error: "The file [path]\immo.mnu coulnd't be opened!" followed by the error text coded into the .bat file.
If I try to run the .exe that the .mnu redirects to DOSBox just stops reacting to inputs (except kill and somesuch).
Anyone know a solution to the problem?

Thank you in advance.

Reply 1 of 5, by Jo22

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l33t++

Hi, another user here - sounds like DBase or DBÜ+Clipper stuff.. I can understand why people hold onto it. 😀

Anyway, from the distance I can't tell what the problem exactly is. Maybe another user has some ideas.
Maybe alternatives like DOSBox-X or MS-DOS Player can run that stuff also ?

Or since it ran fine in NTVDM and there are no timing issues (CPU not too fast), a virtual machine may do the job.
Virtual PC 200x has virtual additions for DOS/Win98, while Virtual Box has decent support for running Win XP.

That being said, please keep in mind that the official DOSBox release is meant for games only.
The developer don't say that because they want to annoy users, but because there's a reason.

It uses "short cuts" in emulation that are good for games and may thus not be accurate if it comes to business applications.
In worst case, the official DOSBox release messes up data or has rounding issues (x87), perhaps.

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

Reply 2 of 5, by Stiletto

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There are commercial-use forks of DOSBox that support business users, such as:
vDOS - https://www.vdos.info/
vDosPlus - http://www.vdosplus.org/
dbDOSv - https://dbdos.com/

However, generally speaking, we don't support them here.

You may indeed be better off using Virtual PC or VMWare or even VirtualBox, that's why they exist.

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 4 of 5, by cyclone3d

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Why not set up a 32-bit version of Windows 10 and see if it will work on that?

Since it works in XP, I don't see why it wouldn't.

Another option is to use something like VirtualBox or Hyper-V and run a virtual machine with the old OS on it.

Also make sure you all have local and cloud backups. It is a miracle if there are no real backups that it hasn't been lost already.

Yamaha modified setupds and drivers
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