Borland C++ v3.1 and 'The Raymond Chen Camp'

Last weekend was a bit of a “compiler weekend” for me; I started playing with VS 2005 and I found some old source code and wanted to build it and that required Borland C++ v3.1 (In the currently fashionable style of naming things - Borland C++ 1991).

I dug through my box of old disks and found a backup of my old 386 development machine. That contained an installation of BC3.1 and, since this is from back when DOS programs ruled I simply copied the directory onto my new dev box and ran it up. After tweaking the display settings on the properties tab I had my old development environment running nicely in a window on XP. It’s times like that when you really appreciate “The Raymond Chen Camp”.

The reason I wanted to play around with Borland C++ 3.1 is that I was adding some new articles to the reprints section and I started thinking about the possibility of uploading the source to my adventure game compiler project. I dug out the source and found that there was no built executable in the zip and the code was non trivial to port to a more modern compiler. Anyway, the compiler works, the source builds and the exe runs; so now all I need to do is get around to writing about my multi-user adventure game bytecode compiler and language…