🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 28 Jul 2004 11:38:27 +0100, Mark Jacobs 
   <> wrote:

> Excuse me, but that mathspenknife program works under *ANY* version of Windows
> starting with Win98. It does *NOT* need any other files, since it is a
> self-contained .EXE executable.

It certainly needs quite a few DLLs, since it's a Windows program
(there's no such thing as a completely self-contained Windows program
that does anything useful, even file I/O uses the kernel DLL).

Specifically, it needs the Advantage Client Engine (some sort of
database system, I gather), which may be obtained (free) from
www.advantagedatabase.com/ (it needs a form filling in).

> It does *NOT* need an installation of BCB on
> the PC it is to run on. So, I do not understand why it does not run on your
> PC, if your PC is running at least Windows 98.

One is running Windows XP Pro, the other is running Windows 2000 Pro.
I downloaded it from your website (twice, once for each machine), they
are the same:

  http://www.jacobsm.com/mathspenknife.exe

The same happens on both, it wants ACE32.DLL which I did not have (on
either machine).  Doing a TDUMP (from the BC++ toolkit) I find it in the
code, with a list of other DLLs:

Imports from ACE32.DLL
    (ord. =    1)
    (ord. =    2)
    (ord. =    4)
    (ord. =    5)
    ...
    and a load more, all by number rather than name

There are also a number of symbols with ACE in them:

  class Adsdata::TACEFieldDef
  class Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs
  __fastcall Adsdata::ACECheck(Adsdata::TAdsDataSet *, unsigned int)
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::TACEFieldDefs(Classes::TPersistent*)
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::Add()
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::GetItem(int)
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::GetOwner()
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::IndexOf(const System::AnsiString)
  __fastcall Adsdata::TACEFieldDefs::SetItem(int, Adsdata::TACEFieldDef*)
  __fastcall Adstable::TAdsStoredProc::BuildACEParamsList()

Does any of that ring a bell?

> The code is *NOT* for free in this instance, since it was developed
> for an application suite that is being released shortly. It took me
> about 2 days to learn to program and query the Windows ACM, but, then
> again, I'm a pretty intense guy!

I presume you mean the source code.  Where did you get documentation on
the Windows ACM, only from the header file or did you find some other
documentation?

Your program works fine, having installed ACE, and does indeed look very
useful.  Thanks for the pointer to it.  Nice dump format for the
WAVEFORMATEX structures, I can copy those straight into my code (a bit
of simple massaging if I want to do it field by field)...

Chris C