Move to xHarbour - beginner questions

[rogerte]

Hi,

We have an old Clipper (5.2e) system that does exactly what is required, but needs to be moved to new PCs.

Everyone is happy to leave "as is" (i.e. no need for GUI enhancements), with the exception of need to be able to print to Windows default printer,as opposed to LPT1, which the new hardware doesn't support (OS will be WIndows 7 32 bit).

The program uses the Six Drive (NSX/SMT files), but apart from that is standard Clipper. Can these be used if I recompile under xHarbour?

I know I need to download the windows binaries from xHarbour.org and a C compiler (can't seem to find the Borland compiler on-line anymore). Someone did suggest to download the free installer from xHarbour.com, but the download links on that site don't appear to work.

Also is there a tutorial on-line anywhere? I haven't been able to find one yet.

Finally can anyone tell me how I can get program to work with Windows printers (uses standard SET DEVICE TO command, @ SAY commands and EJECT command) once I can get it to compile under xHarbour?

Thanks for your help

Roger

 

[JockMullin]

Hi Roger

Hopefully this will answer some of your questions.

Have you tried your app under Win 7 32? It may just work. Most of mine do, and on 64 bit Win 7 sysems I recommend Win 7 Pro and then use XP mode (Free XP in Virtual Machine) to run them there.

The printing is a perennial problem. Although it is true xHarbour does have some support for Windows printers, I have not been able to use it successfully at all. Usually I workaround in one of two ways:

1. Share the windows printer, and then assign a LTP# to it via net use. eg: net use LPT1 \\ComputerName\SharedPrinterName. This should work even if computername is the same computer.

- If that doesn't work satisfactorily then I print the report to a text file (set printer to spool.txt) and when it completes shell to Wordpad (not notepad, which doesn't understand page breaks). The user then gets the report in Wordpad and they can print it from there. When Wordpad is closed the xHarbour program resumes.

AFAIK the Six driver cannot be used in xHarbour. I do not use it so can't say for sure. I use MySQL for large or multiuser databases.

The Borland C compiler is still available. This site:

http://www.cprogramming.com/borland.html

gives basic instructions for obtaining and setting it up.

There is a link on that page to:

http://forms.embarcadero.com/forms/BCC32CompilerDownload

That site requires you to supply a basic name and email registration and they email you a download link to obtain the compiler. Note that they call it BCC32, and I use that one (BCC32.EXE) installed in \borland\bcc55 and it works fine. It is a self decompressing archive called freecommandlinetools.exe.

The download link they email is:

http://altd.embarcadero.com/download/bcppbuilder/freecommandLinetools.exe

so you could just try using that if you don't want to give them your email.

Jock

 

[rogerte]

Thanks for the reply,

Have managed to download the Borland compiler, and have just downloaded xHarbour.

Looks like it is going to be more complex than I thought, because, as well as the NSX driver it also uses Superlib, Grumpfish and Funcky functions I had completely forgotten about (the program was last amended in 1999 to ensure it was Y2K compliant, and last re-compiled in 2002 to include a function to allow it to run on "fast Pentium 4 processors" ).

I am now wondering whether it would be easier to bite the bullet and convert it to Delphi, as we have the Successware Apollo driver, so can keep the same data behind it, and we have some expertise in that system.

Cheers

Roger