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Decompiling a Program Originally Written for DOS

vladtheimpaler1134

12/2/2015 10:41:00 PM

Hello, My name is Adam Morrissette, and I work as a CAD Designer for a monument company in western United States.

I am in a bit of a pickle.

We regularly use a program called fill.exe to batch fill any of our drafts to print out.

We have never found any replacement of this program and it is key to our development.

What it does it takes a line vector drawing and automatically fills in our closed lines. As to how it decides what lines get filled and which ones don't, is beyond me.

A little background on this program, it was originally written in 1992 by our original software developer, who completely dropped our software support after they released a new program which we were not happy with. We have not received any assistance from them in regards to their program since 1997, so we found a new CAD program to use, which our FILL.exe hooks into. However since this program was originally written for DOS, none of our 64 bit computers can run it, we are upgrading all of our pc's as they are outdated, but we do not want to lose the use of FILL.exe.

I have gotten it to run in a DOSBOX Enviro, but it is monumentally slow. (no pun intended) It takes hours to do what it used to in a matter of seconds or minutes.

SO my question to you is this
A: Is there any way to decompile this exe to it's source code, and recompile it into a version that will run on the latest windows.

B:If we cannot, is there a way to decompile it, so it can be read by someone who understands the language it was written in so they can rebuild a program from the ground up based off of how this one works.

C: Does anyone know of any pre existing software that will automatically fill line vector drawings. (This might as well be questions number 1)

Thank you
2 Answers

Jacob Sparre Andersen

12/3/2015 11:08:00 AM

0

Adam Morrissette <vladtheimpaler1134@gmail.com> wrote:

> What it does it takes a line vector drawing and automatically fills in
> our closed lines. As to how it decides what lines get filled and
> which ones don't, is beyond me.

The most efficient solution will probably be to figure out the
algorithms used from the output of the program, rather than by trying to
decompile it.

Greetings,

Jacob
--
»Verbing weirds language.« -- Calvin

Thomas Richter

12/3/2015 2:07:00 PM

0

Am 02.12.2015 um 23:41 schrieb vladtheimpaler1134@gmail.com:
>
> We have never found any replacement of this program and it is key to our development.
>
> What it does it takes a line vector drawing and automatically fills in our closed lines. As to how it decides what lines get filled and which ones don't, is beyond me.
>
> A little background on this program, it was originally written in 1992 by our original software developer, who completely dropped our software support after they released a new program which we were not happy with. We have not received any assistance from them in regards to their program since 1997, so we found a new CAD program to use, which our FILL.exe hooks into. However since this program was originally written for DOS, none of our 64 bit computers can run it, we are upgrading all of our pc's as they are outdated, but we do not want to lose the use of FILL.exe.

If the program was written by one of your employees, you should have all
the rights on the program in first place. So contact the author, and
request to get access to the source code since you're the owner anyhow.

Other than that: Reverse engineering does not sound like a suitable
solution for me. It is tedious, and you rarely get access to the actual
algorithm that was used - it is an enormous work, probably more than
just to rewrite a specific function from scratch once you understand how
the algorithm works.


> B:If we cannot, is there a way to decompile it, so it can be read by someone who understands the language it was written in so they can rebuild a program from the ground up based off of how this one works.
>
> C: Does anyone know of any pre existing software that will automatically fill line vector drawings. (This might as well be questions number 1)

Vector drawings are called vector drawings because they are described by
vectors (not pixel graphics). So what exactly "fill" means to you is a
bit unclear. For any particular vector description language, there
should be a flag that tells the reading program whether a given set of
points describes a filled or unfilled polygon, if this is what you're
asking for.

Greetings,
Thomas