Converting your ancient Clipper or FoxPro program to Windows

Clipper decompiling

Clipper and FoxPro were popular DOS databases in the late 80's - early 90's.  Even now, in 2006, it is astonishing how many mission-critical Clipper and Fox applications are still out there. Seriously!

However these DOS programs don't do well under Windows, and may not run at all in XP or on fast processors, or they may have problems printing. Plus they have a text-based interface, hog processor time which slows everything else down, and can't communicate with Windows programs. They are prehistoric.

These programs need to be converted to Windows before they stop working completely. We've converted many such programs for small businesses, large banks, and software companies. We can do it for you too.

Converting with Visual FoxPro and XHarbour

We convert Clipper and FoxPro to Windows using Visual FoxPro and xHarbour.
 

Visual FoxPro is a solidly supported Microsoft product and modern object oriented programming language. xHarbour is an open source program with a large and active user base. 

With Visual FoxPro at least some, and maybe quite a lot, of your original code can be used in the conversion. Thus the application does not need to be rewritten from scratch as might be true in other conversions. This saves you time and money.

xHarbour will compile existing Clipper applications as is, and the resulting application will be a full Windows application that looks and acts like the Clipper application. This can often be done quickly and inexpensively. Clipper applications often used third party libraries to increase functionality, and any functions in those libraries will need to be rewritten.

With both Visual FoxPro and xHarbour, your existing data files can be used with no conversion whatsoever - another major savings of time and money!

Once the application has been migrated to Windows, it will be far more stable,  run faster,  and will take advantage of this powerful programming language and database to, for example, link to outside data sources and communicate with other Windows programs. 

What to do
 

The easiest way for us to determine what a conversion would entail is to examine the source code.  For small applications,  we can examine it at no cost. For larger applications, we may ask for a small fee, as it can take several hours. Once we've looked at the code, we will get an estimate back to you. Please contact us with any questions you might have. 

Email us for detailed information about what files we need to do an estimate.

Note: If your program is in Clipper, and you have lost the source code - a not uncommon occurrence -  we may be able to decompile it and restore the source code.

You've lost your Clipper source code and are panicking because you need it. We can help. Our decompiler services can often re-create the source code from the executable. 

We will decompile Clipper applications within 24 hours and email you the source code. Simply zip up the executable and email it to us.  If we can decompile it, the charge is $60. You can  pay using PayPal.  If we can not decompile it, there is no charge.  

Before we decompile or migrate your code, we ask for written confirmation that you are the owner of the code.

Note: If your application was compiled in Clipper 5.3, it will not decompile. This is also true if certain linker options were used with recent versions of Blinker.

Technical info

Be aware that, in most cases, the decompiled source code will have tokenized variable names, not the original variable names. This is a function of how the program was originally compiled.

Decompiling is just the start of the process, as it does not restore the code back into the original program files; it sort of scatters the code all over the place, which then needs to be re-assembled into a coherent whole.  

If you want to restore the source to use for migrating to Visual FoxPro,  the job is fairly simple.  We decompile the code, then migrate it, making whatever code changes are needed.