Re: Porting MSDOS TurboVision application to Linux.

[Lisias <li...@un...>]

My Gosh,

I completely forgot about this list! :-)

It's something like... 20 years?  since I signed to it.

On 14.08.19 15:35, steve dyson wrote:
> I need to port a CPP TurboVision business application from MS-DOS to 
> Linux as it is becoming harder an harder to configure the newer 
> versions of windows to provide a correct environment for the program 
> to run in (and I cannot guarantee even newer versions of Windows will 
> support legacy code).
>
> The application originally ran in a pure MS-DOS environment using a 
> LittleBigLan network. I have ported it to run under Windows 98 and 
> then under Windows XP using a Linux based file server.
On the short run, did you tried DOSBOX or, better yet, Virtual BOX? The 
former is faster, but the latter is far more accurate (but somewhat 
resource hogger, you will need a virtualization enabled processor, as i3).


> Is there a preferred flavour of Linux (Debian/Red Hat/etc) that I 
> should choose and which port of TV would be most stable? Should I use 
> 32 bit or 64 bit target (and is there much difference in the 
> performance)? Is there a lists of Gotchas or potential problems that I 
> should be mindful off?
>
A Linux Distro is almost as a religion - you will need to live it in 
order to taste it. My personal distro of choice is OpenSUSE. I like it 
very much, YAST2 saves a huge amount of time while administering the box.

I can't give any opinion about the TV version to use, it's too much time 
since I played with it for the last time - sorry.

Stick with 32 bits as much as you can. 64 bits programs uses twice the 
memory for pointers and memory addresses, it's just a waste of code 
space unless you are dealing with an so huge amount of data that a 2^32 
address space can't hold it.

If 4 G of ram is enough to you, stay away from 64 bits programs. :-) You 
can do 64 bits math in a 32 bits address space targeted program, anyway.

What compiler did you use on your MS-DOS box? Did you tried GCC over 
mingw or cygwin?

-- 
Lisias