Using wine for legacy support under windows?

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 9:34 am

I know it's totally unsupported and probably even a stupid question to ask considering that it's a topic that is nowhere to be discussed in the wiki, but I hope that someone with more clue could help me.

I need to deploy on several machines (laptop) running vista 64 bit an old 16 bit accounting /groupware/calendar application, which is, of course, custom, proprietary and no longer supported by the developer (which was a local developer and has closed since a while, by the way)

Despite of that, it runs decently enough on wine to use it as a temporary solution.

Considering that downgrading the vista machines to 32 bit is a "no go" and that using a virtual machine on every single laptop would be a great pain to support, is there a way to package a windows application on windows the same way that , for example, picasa is packaged to run under linux? even by using cygwin/X is an acceptable solution.

PS: Yeah, I know that after reading the wiki I should know the (negative) answer. I can only hope that some documentation regarding wine on windows is severely outdated or I'm missing something.

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 9:40 am

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:34 AM, mr jingle <[email protected]> wrote:

I know it's totally unsupported and probably even a stupid question to ask considering that it's a topic that is nowhere to be discussed in the wiki, but I hope that someone with more clue could help me.

I need to deploy on several machines (laptop) running vista 64 bit an old 16 bit accounting /groupware/calendar application, which is, of course, custom, proprietary and no longer supported by the developer (which was a local developer and has closed since a while, by the way)

The processor (AMD or Intel) does not support 16 bit protected mode
applications while running in 64 bit mode so you need an emulator to
run 16 bit under 64 bit.

John

Martin Gregorie · Post by **Martin Gregorie** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:14 pm

I need to deploy on several machines (laptop) running vista 64 bit an
old 16 bit accounting /groupware/calendar application, which is, of
course, custom, proprietary and no longer supported by the developer
(which was a local developer and has closed since a while, by the way)

Was the program source put in escrow when you bought it and/or received
the last upgrade? If so, you may be able to get hold of it and either
recompile it for 64 bit operation yourself or get a developer to do that
for you.

Martin

Gert van den Berg · Post by **Gert van den Berg** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:34 pm

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 4:40 PM, John Drescher <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:34 AM, mr jingle <[email protected]> wrote:
I know it's totally unsupported and probably even a stupid question to ask considering that it's a topic that is nowhere to be discussed in the wiki, but I hope that someone with more clue could help me.

I need to deploy on several machines (laptop) running vista 64 bit an old 16 bit accounting /groupware/calendar application, which is, of course, custom, proprietary and no longer supported by the developer (which was a local developer and has closed since a while, by the way)

The processor (AMD or Intel) does not support 16 bit protected mode
applications while running in 64 bit mode so you need an emulator to
run 16 bit under 64 bit.

It does support 16-bit protected mode code, but not real-mode code.
(At least Im not sure about the real-mode code...)

I assume Microsoft made a deliberate decision to drop 16-bit support
in 64-bit Windows, not necessary based on technical limitations...

See the table in this document:
http://developer.amd.com/Pages/623200373.aspx

Gert

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:42 pm

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 3:34 PM, Gert van den Berg <[email protected]> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 4:40 PM, John Drescher <[email protected]> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 10:34 AM, mr jingle <[email protected]> wrote:
I know it's totally unsupported and probably even a stupid question to ask considering that it's a topic that is nowhere to be discussed in the wiki, but I hope that someone with more clue could help me.

I need to deploy on several machines (laptop) running vista 64 bit an old 16 bit accounting /groupware/calendar application, which is, of course, custom, proprietary and no longer supported by the developer (which was a local developer and has closed since a while, by the way)

The processor (AMD or Intel) does not support 16 bit protected mode
applications while running in 64 bit mode so you need an emulator to
run 16 bit under 64 bit.

It does support 16-bit protected mode code, but not real-mode code.
(At least Im not sure about the real-mode code...)

I assume Microsoft made a deliberate decision to drop 16-bit support
in 64-bit Windows, not necessary based on technical limitations...

AMD made the decision not to support this mode when they added 64 bit
extensions to x86.

John

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 4:25 pm

John Drescher wrote: The processor (AMD or Intel) does not support 16 bit protected mode
applications while running in 64 bit mode so you need an emulator to
run 16 bit under 64 bit.

John

Is this true even while "emulated" running under wine? strange because such application show no problem of sort on wine / ubuntu 8.10 64 bit. I'm quite puzzled.

I suppose that the error message "The system file is not suitable for running MS-DOS etc etc..." is just for 16 bit executables, right?

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 6:44 pm

mr jingle wrote:Is this true even while "emulated" running under wine? strange because such application show no problem of sort on wine / ubuntu 8.10 64 bit. I'm quite puzzled.

Then why don't you install Ubuntu on those laptops instead?

John Drescher · Post by **John Drescher** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 7:32 pm

The processor (AMD or Intel) does not support 16 bit protected mode
applications while running in 64 bit mode so you need an emulator to
run 16 bit under 64 bit.

I should have said 16 bit real mode and virtual 8086 modes are not
supported but protected is.

Support for Virtual 8086 mode is not available in x86-64 Long Mode,
although it is still present on 64-bit capable processors running in
32-bit protected mode. The removal of this sub-mode means that 16-bit
compatibility must be rewritten or removed from 64-bit operating
systems. For example, DOS and 16-bit Windows application support is
not present in x64 editions of Windows, necessitating the use of 3rd
party emulation software such as DOSBox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_80 ... it_support

John

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 6:03 pm

These machines are used by a client of mine , a municipal library (I'm a graphic designer, not an actual coder) and unfortunately, they cannot be downgraded to 32 bit Vista nor Ubuntu. Even such testing should be "verboten".

The test was done using a live cd on one of such laptops and a installed ubuntu 64 bit on a Core Duo 2 macbook.

I cannot even release such application due to its nature, being some kind of all-inclusive "projector"-like executable made in Access 97 or similar database software (maybe borland) which contains the database itself (full of sensitive data). The source code is, of course, lost.

I suppose that the "Virtualbox + seamless machine" approach is the most viable option.

Thank you anyway

James McKenzie · Post by **James McKenzie** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 10:22 pm

mr jingle wrote:

These machines are used by a client of mine , a municipal library (I'm a graphic designer, not an actual coder) and unfortunately, they cannot be downgraded to 32 bit Vista nor Ubuntu. Even such testing should be "verboten".

The test was done using a live cd on one of such laptops and a installed ubuntu 64 bit on a Core Duo 2 macbook.

I cannot even release such application due to its nature, being some kind of all-inclusive "projector"-like executable made in Access 97 or similar database software (maybe borland) which contains the database itself (full of sensitive data). The source code is, of course, lost.

I suppose that the "Virtualbox + seamless machine" approach is the most viable option.

Thank you anyway

Why are you using Ubuntu on a Mac? Wine does exist for MacOSX on the
Intel platforms.

James McKenzie

mr jingle · Post by **mr jingle** » Sat Mar 21, 2009 7:43 am

Yep, I know, I even compiled it some time ago without big problems.
Unfortunately, the Macbook was just used to verify that such application was working on a 64 bit environment other than just one machine.It's not an actual deployment machine.