[sisterdear]

Hi guys. I am having a horrible time trying to transfer a dos based program from my old computer to my newer one. It is a program designed by a company that is no longer in business. The program is for livestock feed formulation and is quite old. The last time I spoke to a representative of the Co. was in the year 2000. I received an update. The original program and the 2k update is just on a floppy. After re-installing and entering a password, it says I can now use it but when I go into any part it says to Call Trilogic for a new copy. Is it possible that this program cannot be re-installed?? and if so is there any way I can get around it??
Thank you.
Sharon

[brushmaster1]

If it's truly a DOS program, it should run under Windows with few problems. You can just copy the entire program from your old computer to the Windows 98 machine.

[sisterdear]

I have all the files transferred. The problem is that it appears to be copy protected. If I was to use port to port could I open it that way???

[mole]

On what platform did the livestock feed program originally run: DOS 3.3, DOS 5.0, DOS 6.22, etc.?

What platform are you trying to run it on: W9x/NT/2K/XP?

EDIT: Sorry, I noticed the title of the thread! I see it's Win98.

There are compatability modes in Win2K-sp2+/XP that work pretty well. In Win98, you may be able to start the program before Windows starts. That is not too difficult to do, but try a few other things first. You may also need to append the OS's search path to include the directory the program is installed in by using the "set" command.

set path=c:\feedprog;%path%

(The above will only append the path in the current secondary command prosesssor session under Windows command prompt. You'd have to edit the global environment settings in Windows or configure a special *.pif file with custom %path% settings.)

Since this is an old program it may not recognize a directory named longer that 8 characters or with spaces. If the message about the application being expired is incorrect due to one of the above scenarios, you may need to start the program within its own command processor shell like this:

%COMSPEC% /c c:\feedprog\feedprog.exe

An expanded environment might help too:

%COMSPEC% /e:2048 /c c:\feedprog\feedprog.exe

Toggling to the directory it resides in may also help:

cd c:\feedprog
c:\feedprog\feedprog.exe

On the other hand, it may well be expired, but possible to override the expiration but that may violate copyright, so I'd rather not go down that path further. What does a Google search turn up, others may have had the same problem as you or there may be another vendor with a replacement product.


BTW - Yes, I do specialize in keeping old applications running where I work.

[Perfesser]

The program might be checking the date (a lot of DOS programs do); try this:
uninstall it from the new system
change the system clock to the year 2000
reinstall and see if it works.