However, no matter how much or how little memory I assigned to the VM, the installer’s unzip component would always complain about it being insufficient. Now I had all the pieces on the VM and was ready to install. Luckily, Windows 10 makes it really easy to work with VHD files: double-clicking mounts them as a drive and you can copy any files you want onto them just like with a real disk. So in order to get the Turbo Pascal installer onto the VM, I had to copy it to the VM’s virtual hard drive (VHD). C:\windows\system32\rundll32.exe syssetup,SetupOobeBnkĪfter I did that and could log on normally, I still had trouble with getting a network connection between host and VM.
I was, however, able to boot Windows into safe mode with command prompt, allowing me to execute the following command to “rearm” the activation and buy me some more time to get the registration issues sorted out, because of course, this was a licensed version of Windows.
But without an opportunity to install drivers for the virtual network adaptor, it wasn’t able to get an internet connection and for some reason the phone activation failed as well. Unfortunately, Windows XP demanded I activate before I was able to even log in. The earliest version to run was Windows XP. Unfortunately, all of the machines running Windows 9x/ME would fail to boot in Hyper-V. While in college I had free access to Virtual PC 2004 and so ended up with one virtual machine for each version of Windows I had owned up to that point. This would allow me to tweak the amount of memory the installer was seeing. So next, I tried setting up a virtual machine in Hyper-V. For instance, there is an integer overflow error in the Borland Database Engine causing it to report insufficient disk space when it encounters free space close to a multiple of 2GB. Maybe the problem wasn’t that there was too little memory, but rather too much of it. This is funny as the 256 MB of RAM my laptop has were substantially more than computers had when Turbo Pascal 7 was released. Unfortunately, the installer would not work as it was complaining about “insufficient memory”. I remember fondly many a night spent sitting on that laptop working on some Turbo Pascal project I had given myself. I also still have my 1GHz Pentium III powered laptop running Windows ME from 2001. But I made a backup of the disks’ contents and kept it was as a ZIP file. Also, I doubt, they would even be readable anymore. Of course, I can’t install the software from them anymore, as I don’t have a floppy drive.
I do in fact own the full set of Borland Pascal 7 installation floppy disks as well as the manuals.
Of course, Windows 10 on an 圆4 machine has no way of running 16 bit DOS applications, so I needed a different solution. This was the development environment that I first started programming with in school in 2000. After getting Delphi 2007 to run on Windows 10 and seeing some of my earlier Delphi programming again, I was intrigued to try if I couldn’t get Turbo Pascal 7 working too.