Sage Line 50 on 64bit Windows

Well my 64bit laptop is gradually coming together - only a few more 64bit niggles to iron out and then it's fully up and usable.

The one I've solved today involves Sage Line 50 - and specifically the rather ancient version that I'm fully licensed for - v7.

The installers appear to be a 16bit app (is that possible?) and 16bit apps don't run at all on 64bit windows so that installer just starts setup.exe and does absolutely nothing.

Since I've done a fair bit of installshield work in the past I though the best route would be to monitor the install on a clean machine and reproduce the steps on the new laptop.

Using WinstallLE (from the Windows 2000 Server CD) I built an MSI but more importantly gathered the registry changes that were made during the installation. As always there were lots more than required so I trimmed out everything referencing parts of the registry that weren't relevant to the install.

In addition to the contents of the Line50 folder there are a bunch of files mostly matching SG*.dll in the system32 folder and also SW7*.dll which is the ODBC driver.

I copied these into the main installation folder and got a working Sage - but I knew that the hardest part would be to get the ODBC working.

It turns out that the ODBC driver was built against the MS VC RTL 2 so I copied that and also an unknown dll called MSIMTF.dll.

Once those dependencies were copied across (again into the Line50 folder) I was able to run the 32bit ODBC administrator which cunningly lives in c:\windows\syswow64\odbcad32.exe.

Unsurprisingly the ODBC driver wasn't yet registered which can be performed with the following statement:

C:\WINDOWS\SysWOW64>odbcconf INSTALLDRIVER "Sage Line 50 v7|Driver=c:\work\line50\SW7DBC32.dll|Setup=c:\work\line50\SW7DBC32.dll"

Where "c:\work\line50" is the installation folder.

And hey presto - a working Sage Line 50 complete with reports!