Ancient Access 97 Program

[Jroney]

My family runs a dairy cow feed mill. My father has used a program known as Mixit Win3 to create formulas for us to use since the stone age. It basically takes in various information such as how much of various ingredients a nutritionist wants per head per day and crunches the numbers to tell us what a one ton batch of that mix requires, among other things. It appears to be a collection of .mdb and .mde files which as near as I can tell was created in Access 2.0 back in like 1995.



Unfortunately he has been informed that this program cannot be run on anything newer than Windows XP, and as such he has been running it on a Windows XP computer (with what I believe is Access 97). He can access this computer via a program called team viewer, allowing him to create formulas from his normal laptop.

This old XP computer is on the fritz, and has been more and more difficult to keep functioning with the rest of the the computers in our office. I'd very much like to find a way to eliminate it and simplify things. Buying the new version of the program (Mixit 6) would certainly make that easy, but it does the exact same thing as what we already have.. and costs around five grand. Sadly, not an option. To that end I'm attempting to get this ancient program running on a Windows 10 computer.

I've installed an Access 97 runtime via an installer I found online that is supposed to be able to install onto modern computers without all the issues the normal installer has. It appears to have worked, as it can open the test file they provided without issue. Upon opening the .mde file I assume is supposed to open this program (the shortcut my father uses led to this file) Access gave a number of errors saying that hlvdd.dll was not found. This appears to be some sort of "Hard Lock" security something or other.. I found whatever it is online and installed it into System32 and SysWOW64. These errors went away, but now the darn thing just freezes as soon as it's opened. No errors or anything, just frozen.. not responding.. wait or close?

I rather doubt I'll be able to get any help on this, as it's a rather.. well, odd problem. That said, does anyone out there have any ideas on what I could try next? Is what I'm attempting here even possible?

I've read that Access 2003 can convert these older .mdb files to the newer file types, which allows newer versions of Access to run them, but I'm betting that won't help here as the 2007 runtime I downloaded from microsoft attempts to do this but also informs me that the .mde files cannot be converted or enabled.

[Minty]

Someone may be able to convert it for you, but I wonder what the copy-write implications would be?

[Jen0dorf]

Hi

not sure about conversion but here's one solution

Buy your new PC and purchase a copy of VMware workstation.

This will create a virtual PC on your windows 10 system.

INstall xp or windows 95 on that virtual PC, install access 97 and away you go.

You have a working windpws xp system

HTH

Ian

[aytee111]

You might also try 2010, it is better than 2007 at reading older versions.

[Micron]

Whatever route you end up taking do not convert this old db if it's possible to copy it and convert the copy. If at all possible, I would not do anything to the current version - ever - lest things go badly. If you're buying a tower type of pc, one thing you can do is get an extra drive and put old operating systems and applications on it if they'll be compatible with your new architecture. I used to do this, with a startup routine that allowed me to choose which drive to boot from so I didn't have to swap drives in one bay.

[ssanfu]

I tried to find more info and googled "Mixit Win3" and "Mixit 6".... no results.

You could hire someone to create a dB for you. If you bought a program, the "How" of the calculations should not be a national secret (should it??).

I did find http://www.winfeed.com/
Free demo - full program about $150.

And they will customize the program for you per your requirements........

[Jroney]

I tried to find more info and googled "Mixit Win3" and "Mixit 6".... no results.

You could hire someone to create a dB for you. If you bought a program, the "How" of the calculations should not be a national secret (should it??).

I did find http://www.winfeed.com/
Free demo - full program about $150.

And they will customize the program for you per your requirements........

Suppose I got the name wrong, the new version is MixitWin 6. First result on google. They don't have any information on the site regarding older versions.

We could try something new, and I'm certain there are cheaper alternatives out there (thousands of dollars for this program seems absolutely outrageous).. but then I'd also have to convince the boss to learn to use a new program. He's been using the same program since the mid 90's, long past its expiration date - sadly I don't like the odds on that speech check.

I've never done them by hand, but I don't think the calculations are all that difficult. I could probably do them by hand, and maybe even put together something like an excel spreadsheet to automate it - but again, there's no way he'd stop using this program. My only real options are either to get it running natively on Windows 10, get it running on a virtual XP machine, or continue on with trying to keep this actual XP computer functioning and communicating with the rest of the office computers. I'm hoping to find a way to make it run on Windows 10 with as few complications as possible, but I'm beginning to think there might not be a way to do that.

Out of curiosity, could there be some sort of memory issue? Every mid-90's game I've installed on my Windows 10 computer has required installing a sort of compatibility patch to the .exe that enabled things like global memory lie. Games tend to crash on startup if the computer doesn't lie about how much memory it has, as they couldn't comprehend gigabytes worth of memory.

Access 97 doesn't seem to have that issue, as it starts up just fine with some of the databases.. but could that be an issue regardless? Is there any way to patch a .mde file for compatability options like you would for other old programs?

[pbaldy]

Post 7 was moderated, posting to trigger email notifications.

[Micron]

An mde (or now accde) file is simply an Access database file that has had it's vba code compiled, so basically, it's not viewable anymore. To the best of my recollection at the moment, query sql views and macro steps can be looked at, but that's about all. So if the application is an mde, not only is there nothing you can do to the design, it's not like it is an executable. It runs within the Access application. If you can run other 97 db's on an old pc, you should be able to run this one. If not, there is something about it that is causing a problem (note I didn't say there was something wrong with it). It could be as simple as a reference which is now outdated, so it could be a library that you may not be able to find even if you could discover what that was. Error messages might provide a clue (such as not being able to find an old version of some MS app like Excel), but if those are all about the hard lock driver, then I suspect the old Access app looks at your registry or file structure and tries to locate the file. I believe that's all about anti-piracy (DRM or digital rights management) in which case you might be out of luck unless you continue to run this on an old OS (as I mentioned, a swappable hard drive). While it may find the dll if you've installed it, you can't read the code to see what's going on after that. It could have stored an old registry setting somewhere and if it doesn't match, they may have elected to disable the program, thinking you're copying the db to other pc's to avoid paying for additional licenses. Point is, we have no idea as to what they might have done to protect against copying.

If you want to make the old guy happy, why not replicate the functionality of the old db and build a new one? I'm not saying to pirate anything out of the old one. I doubt it is a relational database concept so unique that what it does could be copyrighted any more than the idea of a spreadsheet doing calculations. While the look would be more modern if you built this in a newer version, it could function the same. You could even keep your old data, and while you're at it, figure out what the old one doesn't do and add more functionality if that's of interest.

[ssanfu]

Found it. It looks like it had a lot more than just calculations... Depends on how many other things you need... ie

• Balance rations by daily amounts. Undo the last balanced ration.
• Export data to text files, spreadsheets, or word processing programs.
• Import data from the MIXIT-2 or MIXIT-2+ feed formulation programs.
• Calculate nutrient amounts from equations while balancing rations.
• Select the American system, the metric system, or another system of weights.
• Choose between English or Spanish, or enter the words of your own language.
• Factor ingredient and nutrient constraints; and factor nutrients in ingredients.
• Maintain separate databases for different plants, clients or animal types.
• Add or delete an ingredient or nutrient in many rations automatically.
• Change the value of a nutrient based on the values of other nutrients.
• Record products you regularly purchase, and write purchase orders.
• Find a name or part of a name. Change prices by price equations.

plus more...

My only real options are either to get it running natively on Windows 10, get it running on a virtual XP machine,

I would focus on a virtual XP machine on Win 10. You would need a valid copy of XP and a valid copy of Access97/ Office97. ( a whole lot of luck wouldn't be bad either )