Hello, I don’t really know anything about REALbasic or Xojo, so please excuse my ignorance about the program and coding in general.
So, I was using this great program on my old 32 bit mac, and then upgraded the mac and it won’t run on the 64 bit system.
The creator of the program gave me all the files in case I wanted to try to change it from 32 to 64, but I have NO IDEA how difficult or time consuming it would be.
The program is Advanced Mario Sequencer and is clone of the music making portion of the 90s SNES game MarioPaint.
here is the program download page: https://flyx.org/ams/
Again, I don’t know if this is too hard, or even doable, but I was directed here and told that there may be somebody with answers.
Thanks in advance for any and all answers (but especially the ones that take into consideration that I know nothing here, yet).
cheers!
The amount of work involved can vary from “basically nothing” to “complete re-write” depending on a number of factors. Do you have permission to share the source files?
The first step would be to load up the source code in the Xojo IDE, switch it to 64 bit build mode, and then try to compile the program. Compiling will either succeed or it will fail with a list of detected problems. If it succeeds then you’re 90% done. If there are problems then you’ll have to correct each one and try again.
There may also be other compatibility problems if the code was originally written in REALstudio.
I would say that , unless you were at least a programmer with other languages, this would be VERY daunting.
And even if you were a “programmer”, if you were totally unfamiliar with Xojo, this could be quite a hurdle.
Just the fact that the author of the program is washing his/her hands of it would imply that they thought it was going to be a bother to upgrade. The website implies that the creator is not willing to spend the money to get the later versions of Xojo.
It sounds like something that I would not touch.
Looking at just the executable, I don’t see much that would need migrating other than “libfluidsynth.dylib”. It’s possible the project would run if compiled under 64bit, however, I expect that you might run into issues regarding this library. The source code is available but not compiled from what I can see. You would most likely need to get that complied before the program would be fully functional.
Another alternative to your dilemma, would be to run either VMWare Workstation Player (for Windows) or VMware Fusion (for Mac).
And Run the Game inside of a Virtual Machine. The vmware product links are below for convenience
https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion.html | https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-player.html. There might be a cost to Fusion, but I believe Workstation player is free.
Just a thought, if you run into troubles converting the code.
You also have the free (from Oracle) VirtualBox .
After a cursory look through the source I’d say 64 bit support will be relatively easy. Declares are usually the most brittle part of an app when porting to 64 bit, but the FluidSynth wrapper uses mostly Integer and Ptr typed parameters which map to the correct bit-width automatically.
Updating the old GUI code to work in modern editions of Xojo is probably going to give you more trouble than 64 bit support. I see a lot of uses of Self.Graphics and Me.Graphics to draw stuff to the screen, for example, which Xojo doesn’t allow anymore.