QB4.5 on XP, SP3

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gmeast
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Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2015 10:16 pm

QB4.5 on XP, SP3

Post by gmeast »

Hello,

I'm a newbie here at this forum. All I wanted to do is share a rather exciting discovery (for me anyway). I haven't read any of the archives so don't get mad if someone else has posted something similar.

I am still running XP Pro, SP3 because I have allot of technical software that won't run on 7 or 8 and some won't run in 'modes'. I write allot of little number crunching code in qb4.5 (actually licensed). I've used it for decades. Normally I use a dedicated DOS machines running DOS 6.0 (actually licensed). The DOS machines have been temporarily unavailable, so I tried to find a way to use it on my XP computer.

I had the same problem as everyone else installing from original 3.5" discs. This probably works if you do what I did on a native drive in XP ... like Drive C:, but I did what follows, on a 64Gig SD card after updating with the exFAT upgrade (find that at Microsoft). I like to turn everything I code in qb4.5 into executables. As many have found, qb4.5 will come back with "can't find BC.exe", etc. ... or any other files for that matter. Here's what I did:

I made a directory on the SD card called qb45. I copied everything to that directory, which were advisory, setup & utilities. The 'advisory' directory has QB.EXE in it. The 'utilities' directory has BC.EXE and all of the other important files QB4.5 uses to compile an .exe. I simply copied everything in the 'utilities' directory into the 'advisory' directory. I open the SD card directory to drive\qb45\advisory and 'double click' QB.EXE and the it opens the CMD window and runs QB4.5.... ???? don't know why, but it worked. You can also open the CMD window from START, Run CMD from the desktop and type in the path to your SD card ... in my case ... "j:\qb45\advisory\qb.exe". I guess just as long as XP can find everything it needs in the same file folder, it works.

I wanted to share this tidbit. regards,

gmeast
gmeast
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Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Apr 06, 2015 10:16 pm

Re: QB4.5 on XP, SP3

Post by gmeast »

Hi again,

I just realized that I actually didn't finish my previous post so here goes:

... it might be best to have the program you want as a stand-alone .exe on the card somewhere too. When you're ready to make the .exe, just go Run, Make .exe, tab through the .exe menu, select 'make stand-alone .exe' and it creates your .exe, depositing the .obj and .exe in the advisory directory.

Now exit everything, (you might want to move your .bas, new new .obj & .exe filed to a sensible directory because 'advisory' is pretty crowded now), launch the CMD prompt from 'start\run' in your XP, navigate to your new .exe file and type its name newprog.exe (or whatever name). Up it comes.

Realize when your .exe is running it hogs the CPU so any other running application gets slow. Maybe a good emulator will fix this so you can run other things in the background. I tried DosBox but couldn't figure out how to switch back'n forth between DosBox and XP. But creating the .exe was the main point of this post anyway..

Thanks. I'm ashamed I never knew this all these decades.

gmeast
iamdenteddisk
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Posts: 185
Joined: Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:10 pm

Re: QB4.5 on XP, SP3

Post by iamdenteddisk »

qb4.5 must be in the "C:\Compiler" directory to work correctly at all. unless you run some version i never seen..
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burger2227
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Location: Pittsburgh, PA

Re: QB4.5 on XP, SP3

Post by burger2227 »

Huh?
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