Decompiling an old Program

Posted by Pedro Laranjeiro on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Pedro Laranjeiro
Published on 2011-01-01T23:24:16Z Indexed on 2011/01/02 0:54 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 245

Filed under:

Windows

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delphi

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winapi

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ms-dos

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decompiler

Hi. I have been asked to update a program written in 1987 in Delphi (I guess). I have no documentation about this program only a few side notes the programmer took that don't make too much sense to make.

The cd show this files:

Size | Filename

 - 19956    VP.DTA 
 - 142300   VP.LEX 
 - 404      VP.NDX 
 - 126502   VP.RCS 
 - 131016   VP.SCR 
 - 150067   VP.XEL 
 - 101791   vp.exe

Is anyone of this files a database? If so can I access it's data?

I tried several code decompilers but they show a message saying it was not a Win32 compatible application. The program run in MS-DOS.

Is it possible to obtain the source code? Can I use this code in any way to build a new application?

Thanks

Update01: I can run the program in MSDOS. The program conjugate verbs and shows an example sentence where the verb can be used. The GUI is a little bit confusing and there is no help menu so I can't see all the capabilities of the program.

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