I am summarizing this because I hope it will help others. I have a legecy
pedigree program called CompuPed4 which was manufactured in 1999 and was
basically a dos program. I am a legal owner with a password and a legal
special install floppy disk.
The install disk is not a normally modern windows floppy formatted and for
example will not install the program under windows NT.
Since the author died in 1999 updates to my version of the program have
not been available.
Problem -as time passed it became increasingly obvious that compuped was
not running correctly on later versions of windows. Mostly it was memory
problems. For a while I was using a dual boot computer with PCDOS 2000
installed and also windows. However the ONLY reason I had to use windows
was CompuPed and then when I got my Athlon computer 3 years ago even with
PCDOS it would crash because its indixes seemed to be overwriting
themselves in memory.
So I fussed around with alternative ways of doing pedigrees for our dogs
and installed Ubuntu GNU/Linux on my Athlon.
Then last week I read about Freedos and dosemu on my Linux list.
I had a small spare IDE drive and a machine with drive drawers so I
downloaded the FDOS 1.0 Final iso image and made a bootable CD and
installed it on the little IDE drive. Came right up and I was able to do a
regular install of CompuPed from its floppy and I transferred my datafiles
from CD rom storage.
Hint 1 - remember when you copy read-write files from a CD they may copy
as write protected so you have to change their attibutes.
The program performed well but I was basically using a single task
system and anytime I needed to check data across the internet I either
needed a second computer or I had to reboot.
So i tried installing FreeDos under Virtual PC on the OSX MAC we have (a
power PC mac). Freedos installed fine and ran but I could not get it to
recognize the USB floppy drive on the MAC and the machine has no other
floppy drive.
So I went to the Athlon - which has Linux on it and installed Freedos
and dosemu via the package manager.
I was impressed. Came up and ran but I had problems installing the
pedigree program using the special floppy
I joined this list and Eric Auer has been very helpful. Here is what I
had to do because of the special nature of this program and its paranoid
copy protection.
Hint 2 - use xdosemu not dosemu (thanks Eric)
It happens the hardrive on the Athlon has a small (500mg) hda1
partition which is fat16.
So I mounted that partition in my home directory which xdosemu sees as
drive D:
Then I made sure the permissions were set by linux so that I the user
was owner of the files and they were wrx.
Then I used the special install floppy to install the program into
/dev/hda1 (which is mounted as dosdev0).
My Linux set up seems to take a long time to look at a PC formatted floppy
and there is a lot of grinding and waiting but the setup program did work
and the Compuped4 was installed.
I also mounted my standalone Freedos HD on my home directory. Xdosemu can
also see it. However the Compuped program installed on that drive
will not run under Xdosemu under linux although it will run
standalone. I am sure this has to do with the paranoid copy protection.
Then I had some problems with keyboard character. colon, semi colon and
quote would not print. I tried booting into KDE and running the Konsole
terminal but that did not work.
Eric suggested turning X_keycode off in the dosemu.conf.
Under Kubuntu and with Konsole this immediately fixed all of my keyboard
problems except the quotes.
My birthday, went out to dinner. Turned off computer.
When I restarted later the computer booted into gnome as normal and I
opened a gnome shell and ran xdosemu and all the keys worked correctly.
Now the program runs in its little window and the only problem I have is
that when I make a new entry the program reports an error in saving the
new entry to disk (the error is that it cannot find the path) and I have
to do an escape to return to the program - but despite what it is
reporting - it has successfully saved the entry to the harddrive. So it is
a little annoying but I can work with it.
I suspect the path error has to do with the program's internal storage of
the path information not matching what Dosemu tells it to do.
I am going to try and edit a copy of the Compuped config file in a hex
editor but this may not work because part of its copy protection probably
has to do with checksums on all its files. I'll see.
So maybe this will be of help to someone else with a testy legacy
program that has copy protection but that you still have the original
media and are in possessio of the passwords.
I have summarized this because Eric and I corresponded off list but I know
from other lists that a discussion can help other people do similar
things.
Thank you for a fine program and a helpful list.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bonnie Dalzell, MA
mail:5100 Hydes Rd ---- Hydes MD USA 21082-----EMAIL:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
freelance anatomist, vertebrate paleontologist, writer, illustrator, dog
breeder, computer nerd & iconoclast... Borzoi info at www.borzois.com.
Editor Net.Pet Online Animal Magazine - http://www.netpetmagazine.com
HOME http://www.qis.net/~borzoi/ BUSINESS http://www.batw.com
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