Opening old programs in QBasic in Win 7

[David]

Hello all,

I'm trying to help my dad transition from a dying Win XP box to a new Win 7 box. He has a number of programs half-written, some quite long, which he desperately wants to continue working on. I've managed to get QBasic running in VM Player as per the instructions here: http://www.qbasic.net/en/qbasic-downloa ... vmware.htm However, there are two major problems:

• 1. The font size is too small for him to read, and there seems to be no way of re-sizing the window or increasing the font size
  2. The computer's folder structure seems to be inaccessible from within VM Player, meaning that we can't open the old programs

I may be missing something obvious here, but if anyone can offer solutions to these problems I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,
David.

[crossroads]

Hello all,

I'm trying to help my dad transition from a dying Win XP box to a new Win 7 box. He has a number of programs half-written, some quite long, which he desperately wants to continue working on. I've managed to get QBasic running in VM Player as per the instructions here: http://www.qbasic.net/en/qbasic-downloa ... vmware.htm However, there are two major problems:

• 1. The font size is too small for him to read, and there seems to be no way of re-sizing the window or increasing the font size
  2. The computer's folder structure seems to be inaccessible from within VM Player, meaning that we can't open the old programs

I may be missing something obvious here, but if anyone can offer solutions to these problems I'd be very grateful.

Thanks in advance,
David.

Just try to run QBasic with DOSBox
This seems to be a better solution for your needs.

[David]

Many thanks, Crossroads. I'll keep DOSBox in mind. Another idea I found after posting the original message was QB64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64), which runs on modern versions of Windows without needing DOS. I'll see how Dad goes with that, and keep DOSBox as a fall-back in case that doesn't work out for any reason (I did try running DOSBox on my computer, but had more success with QB64).

Cheers, David.

[crossroads]

Many thanks, Crossroads. I'll keep DOSBox in mind. Another idea I found after posting the original message was QB64 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64), which runs on modern versions of Windows within needing DOS. I'll see how Dad goes with that, and keep DOSBox as a fall-back in case that doesn't work out for any reason (I did try running DOSBox on my computer, but had more success with QB64).

Cheers, David.

Recently I've written an article about DOSBox and QBasic. Definitely it's worth it to take a look at it.