Assistance needed with old Turbo/Borland Pascal 7 project

[Dilan Rona]

Hi

As stated in my title, I have an old library from 1993, by Paul Coxwell. That I need assistance to get working with Free Pacal. If it was just the pascal aspect, I would probably manage. but the assembly portion is completely beyond me.

TURBO PASCAL LIBRARY
Version 2.1, June 1993

I have the complete archive, with all the supporting source code for example programs, the units, the assembly files thats needed. And what I need the most is the ENHCON unit. Will provide it once there is some interest in trying to revive and modernise it. Will also upload screenshots of what ENHCON can do once I get a vm with MSDOS 6.22 up and running with Borland Pascal 7.

[SilverWarior]

If it was just the pascal aspect, I would probably manage. but the assembly portion is completely beyond me.

If the assembly code was written with 32 bit architecture in mind then FreePascal could easily compile it to your application. But if it was perhaps written for 16 bit architecture or relies on working around CPU protected mode such code would probably fail to execute on modern CPU's.

Will also upload screenshots of what ENHCON can do once I get a vm with MSDOS 6.22 up and running with Borland Pascal 7.

Instead of MS DOS 6.22 you may want to try FreeDOS https://www.freedos.org/
Sometimes FreeDOS tends to work more reliably in VM's compared to the original MS DOS. So you may want to check it out especially if you don't have original MS DOS installation floppies handy.

Unfortunately I don't know enough assembly to be much of a hand. But I do have some experience setting up DOS environments on modern computers so I can play some old DOS games.

PS: Perhaps you could even manage to make your old application work in DOS emulators like:

• DOSBox https://www.dosbox.com/ or
• DOSBox-X https://dosbox-x.com/

[Dilan Rona]

FreeDos could do I suppose. But the hope was to get this to work on Linux systems via FreePascal as well.

[Dilan Rona]

Screenshot_20250908_023209.jpgScreenshot_20250908_023309.jpgScreenshot_20250908_023333.jpgScreenshot_20250908_023409.jpg

Some of the screenshots of the ENHCON library. Granted, it can be made easily with FreePascal. But I was hoping to get that old gem working on FreePascal.

Screenshots are all from VirtualBox running MSDOS 6.22, with Borland Pascal 7 installed (with the RTL library fixes added in).

[SilverWarior]

While I'm not sure I would be able to help you I would still like to see the code of this unit. Mostly I'm wondering why would someone need to use assembly code just for creating these text based windows.
I'm guessing one might use assembly code to intercept keyboard or perhaps mouse interrupts on hardware level. As far as I know these are not supported by CRT.pas unit that would otherwise be used for creating and managing text windows.

[Dilan Rona]

http://annex.retroarchive.org/cdrom/...AL/TPLIB21.ZIP

That is the project in its whole. The exe file in the archive is a self extracting zip, and you need to run it with MSDOS 6.22, or another 16 bit dos operating system. I got it extracted on my end allready. And provided archives for TPLib v 2.0, and 2.1 as well (see zip file attached for decompressed code).

Best I could maybe do is make a recreation of ENHCON (but it will be a poor recreation. Especially if it looses the speed that the original had for its time). But in my opinion, it would make for a great addition to FreePascal.

Thanks for being interested in this gem as well

Dilan