Does PB Dos run under win2k?

[Paul Dwyer]

I'm referring specifically to the development environment, because when I downloaded the firstbasic and tryPB 3.2 demos neither of them them ran, there were errors regarding not finding himem.sys and a couple of others.

I'm teetering on the edge of buying PBDos at the new price for building some boot disk apps to help with client system recovery at work. PBDos looks to have a dos interface so I'm a little worried that I won't be able to run the dev env in my PC!!

I have other program editors I can use for the bulk of the time I suppose but it looks like there's a little more to it than that. Any feedback you can give me would be welcome

Thanks

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Paul Dwyer
Network Engineer
Aussie in Tokyo

[Lance Edmonds]

It sure does run under Win2K and all current Win32 O/S's... I run it here under Win2K daily!

It should run fine without any system changes, but if your system has been "tweaked", then you may need to do a few minor changes:

First, check the properties of PB.EXE in Windows Explorer - be sure to set the Memory Tab settings to give the IDE 4Mb of XMS and at least 4Mb of EMS (pref 16Mb) - Mine is set for 16Mb EMS, 8Mb XMS, Uses HMA.

Also, you may find you'll need to edit your CONFIG.NT and AUTOEXEC.NT files to maximize memory at the expense of CDROM drivers, DPMI, etc. (These files are usually located in your C:\WINNT\SYSTEM32 folder)... Mine look like this:

config.nt
dos=high, umb
device=%SystemRoot%\system32\himem.sys
files=40

autoexec.nt
@echo off
path=G:\PB35;%path%;

REM Install CD ROM extensions
rem lh %SystemRoot%\system32\mscdexnt.exe

REM Install network redirector (load before dosx.exe)
rem lh %SystemRoot%\system32\redir

REM Install DPMI support
rem lh %SystemRoot%\system32\dosx

...I hope this helps!

Note that you can create copies of these *.NT files, and direct the PB.EXXE shortcut to use these alternative system files.

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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Eric Pearson]

Paul --

It's not an exhaustive test by any means, but I just dragged PB.EXE over to a network drive and ran it from my Windows 2000 test system. No problems at all. I typed PRINT "HELLO WIN2K" and it worked fine when I ran it.

-- Eric

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Perfect Sync Development Tools
Perfect Sync Web Site
Contact Us: mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Eric Pearson]

Paul --

I just compiled my largest PB/DOS program on my Windows 2000 system, with no problems. It took a while longer than normal, probably because I didn't configure the extended memory options, but other than that it was a perfectly normal compile.

Using PB.EXE 3.50...

In the neighborhood of 250 $INCLUDE files, plus several $LINK files.
About 41,000 lines of code
Resulting .PBC (chain) file: 311,150 bytes

All that with no configuration at all... I just started PB.EXE from Windows Explorer.

-- Eric


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Perfect Sync Development Tools
Perfect Sync Web Site
Contact Us: mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Semen Matusovski]

Yesterday I ordered PB DOS to use it instead of Turbo Basic. Hope, that on Monday (?) I'll receive it.

I don't plan to write new programs, but I have a lot of old TB programs, mostly utilities for "main" programs (not for customers - ah, time for DOS is over many years ago).
Time to time I modify these programs and I am intersting

1) Can I simply recompile TB programs in PB DOS ?
I am worry, first of all, about inline (I created a set of assembler subroutines).
2) I didn't touch autoexec.nt (so, dos = high, umb .... himem.sys ... files = 80).
mem shows 624944 as maximum size of Exe-program (good).
In demo-release I typed Print Fre(-1) and see 142688 (much less than in TB).

How exactly I need to modify *.nt ?

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E-MAIL: [email protected]

[Lance Edmonds]

$INLINE is still supported, but you could convert that code to ASM.
SUB INLINE is also still supported.
However, both of these features may *not* be supported in future version(s)...

Whether your assembly code needs to be changed will probably depend on what the code does - ie, if it was designed to work with the TB string engine, it will probably need some changes to work with the PB string engine.

Other than that, you may encounter keyword vs. variable name conflicts (PB/DOS supports many new keywords that TB does not).

Regarding *.NT files... I REMmed out most of the stuff in my AUTOEXEC.NT file and it gave me an extra 20 or 30Kb of conventional memory. Actually, I have a file specifically for PB/DOS sessions called AUTOEXEC_PBDOS.NT and my desktop shortcut to PB.EXE uses that file instead of the standard file. I inserted the /PB35 path at the top of the path statement to speed things up a little too (the default NT path is actually pretty large and cumbersome).

Still, if your apps are not too large and do not require a lot of conventional memory (ie, to run within the IDE), then the standard settings will probably work fine for you.



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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Paul Dwyer]

Thank you all for your replies,

I managed to fix the problem, I cheated a little and copied himem.sys, ansi.sys and kkfunc.sys into folders that the system was looking for thiem in. Then since I'm using a non-english version of win2k I had to type "US" at the commande prompt to set the code page to 437

Thanks again

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Paul Dwyer
Network Engineer
Aussie in Tokyo