Ideas for running a VB4 application on modern hardware?
mark at markesystems.com
mark at markesystems.com
Mon May 2 13:43:49 CDT 2016
> I have a Visual Basic 4 application that I need to run on modern 64-bit
> hardware I can do this in a VM, but I really need this VM to be wicked
> small, like under a gig. The smallest XP VM I?ve seen is 600MB (which
> might
> be good) but XP is becoming very hard to source these days.
VB4 was a bridge between 16-bit Windows 3.1 applications and 32-bit
everything later (such as the DOS-based Win-95, -98, and -ME, and all of the
NT-based operating systems, which is everything else through Win-10 64-bit).
As such, the package included both a 16-bit an 32-bit compiler. If your
application was compiled using the 16-bit version, you're pretty much stuck
with XP-32 or earlier (in a VM, if necessary), as it will automatically
spawn a 16-bit virtual environment (ntvdm.exe) to run the 16-bit
applications. Win7 and beyond, and all 64-bit versions, do not support this
feature (I supported a VB3 application for 20 years; Win7 was what finally
broke it for good.)
If it was compiled to 32-bit, then you should be pretty much good to go; you
may run into a few insurmountable problems with some now unsupported OCX's.
Other than those, all of the 32-bit code should run fine on anything
current.
If you have the source, you're also in pretty good shape. VB4 is very easy
to port to VB6; there were almost no backward-incompatible features of the
later Visual Basic classic languages. Find an old copy of VB6 SP6,
re-compile it (perhaps replacing some of the failed OCXs with others that
will work - a common one was DBGrid, which is quite easy to replace with
FlexGrid), and you're golden. I currently support just such an application,
and although the development environment requires a couple of tricks to get
working smoothly, the compiled application works just fine on Win10-64.
Drop me a note off-line if you'd like any additional or more specific help
with this; I have a reasonable amount of experience with just this problem.
Of course, there are always older versions of Wine...
~~
Mark Moulding
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