Buy an old copy of win 95 from a well known auction site

WinME may be ok too

A note of caution, all my old assembly stuff works fine on ME and XP, so I would buy W95

It may be a dll issue kinda thing, something specific

Put the W95 on a cheap IDE 30gigabyte hard drive and only plug it in when you need it

Even a cheapo external drive may do the job

If you have a high end fancy graphics card unplug it and try the bog standard motherboard graphics

Edited By Ady1 on 29/08/2015 00:03:51

+1 for Windows95

Whilst you'e at it … give it a dose of IEradicator

MichaelG.

Whilst you'e at it … give it a dose of IEradicator

I would disagree, just don't surf the net with internet exploder, use firefox or summat

The old original IE has some fabby activeX stuff and other hacker friendly bits which can be used for offline database work if you ever need it, there was a lot of functionality in the original IE which has been eliminated for security reasons

Just don't surf with it and you'll be fine

Modern Computers are becoming mini-internet databases nowadays, 2 terrabyte drives are common and the amount of offline information you can store on a desktop is mind boggling

IE can search hundreds of gigabytes of stuff in a few seconds

Edited By Ady1 on 29/08/2015 07:14:35

I would disagree, In the most friendly way

Upgrades have been reducing functionality in recent years, I stuck with XP because of zonealarm pro, which Vista refuses to use(because it's so good IMO, it even blocks microsoft)

I also have a Win ME drive I plug in if required

When I upgrade to 64 bit I will unplug my two older drives(XP and ME) and use a separate drive, 64 bit stuff can be amazingly fast but I have tons of useful 32bit stuff that I want to hang on to and I don't want any upgrading to mess things up for "security reasons" or any other excuse that they come up with

Edited By Ady1 on 29/08/2015 07:51:39

There is more chance of an older application running under wine than many "new" ones. It is probably worth trying that. Also install Q4Wine. It eases wine configuration problems and also WineTricks which provides a lot of dll's. It's infuriating when things nearly run. What it lacks is something to track dll calls.

There is also another wine add on called Swine but unlike Q4Wine it's not possible to easily specify what directory a program needs to run in.

Failing that VirtualBox is easy to use. I would have thought XP would be the thing to install on it but I don't think I would allow any of them to update unless there was no choice as all it will do is slow it down. From memory XP will emulate earlier versions of windows but has to be set for the program that needs it.

John

–

You could try the trial version of BBC BASIC for Windows, it makes graphics very easy.

Neil

Must admit I miss GWbasic. I used to use it at work for modelling software that would eventually be written in assembler for use on an ECU with the advantage the it could produce graphical output and quick things that needed a graphical output to see what was going on. Many pro software people say I wont use that – 'cause it's called BASIC. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.

Pity it wasn't called something else because the original Dartmouth version is probably the most comprehensive concise computational instruction set ever invented. An excellent learning tool because various types etc have to be built up by the person who is writing it. GWbasic retained that with graphics in a simple form.

Out of interest it seems microshaft refered to it as Gee Wizz basic. Some reckon it stands for something else.

John

–

Where is the Linux version Michael. Working with windows at work cured me of it more or less completely.

I suspect some of my opinions comes from the complete and utter pigs ear they made of dos but I have done some deep windows tampering as well, Not for a long time though. The trouble with doing the sort of thing that I mentioned is that it's an aid to a main task. There comes a point where it just takes too long to do anything useful with it to be worth while. I kicked windows into touch for this sort of thing when they decided that vars declared out of main were no longer static under C. Ok I just had to declare them but ……. The graphics at that point were mostly too long winded to use anyway.

John

–

There used to be an ideal about called a threaded code compiler that was ideal for Basic. It works on the principle of having basic in memory as a run time. The program was then just a series of calls to it. Very fast and memory efficient. Some would also allow blocks of code to be inserted so that all or critical sections didn't do any calls at all.

This might sound familiar to some under other language names.

Next time I need to do some fast crunching quickly without any complications I'll take a look at the cross platform GWbasic – thanks Michael. There is another Linux / Win basic but it often gets messed up by windows people doing work on it. Could I be bothered to fire up C or C++ and produce proper graphics output – no. They leave too much work to do.

John

–

I couldn't help looking that man up in the wiki Neil and noticed the comment computer science was in crisis in 1968 etc. Interesting one. The only language standard that did stick to there guns and tried to prevent programmers from doing all sort of things is Cobol. C++ did initially but like all it didn't last. Really a lot of the changes are down to deskilling the problem of producing reliable maintainable code and have nothing what so ever to do with the basic (pun) problem. Fashion can be one. I once did some work on some one else's code who came from the subroutines are wonderful era – when I traced the flow of something that was acting up I went 16 deep and decided that the guy was a nut and just junked it and replaced the lot. No doubt he had been told that subroutines were the way.

Truth is structure techniques cab be achieved in any language they just look different. Trouble is that some need something like a GOTO to do it but what's wrong with that if it's to somewhere rather logical like the end of a while do loop. The only problem with GOTO is some will just do that and stuff the rest of the things that might be going on.. I've even heard senior pundits state that these sort of loops are bad idea as programmers blah blah .. so get rid of them. They'd probably love pure in line code with no branches at all. Actually that's not a bad approach but seldom possible.

John

–