Visual C++ Toolkit 2003

For those 2-3 people still searching for this thing, it’s the old ‘free’ CLI C++ compiler from Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.3052 for 80×86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

Although Visual C++ .NET 2003 SP1 gives you a later version of the compiler…

Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.6030 for 80×86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

I’m not sure if you can service pack this toolkit.

You can download it from my site as VCToolkitSetup.exe

For anyone who wants to run this under newer versions of Windows as I know I can’t install it on Windows 8 or 10, I installed it on my Windows XP x64 machine, and uploaded it here as vc2003toolkit.7z

By the time this came out, Microsoft had started to admit that they had lost serious ground to GCC, as for years they had neglected the low end $99 market that they had dominated during their fights with Borland in the QuickC vs TurboC days.  Once Borland had withdrawn from the market, Microsoft felt no need to compete and this left plenty of time for GNU tools to take hold in the marketplace.  This was a stopgap reaction as a prelude to the Visual Studio Express that would happen in 2005 onward.

Elsewhere I’ve been able to find an old Windows 2003 SP1 Platform SDK image, it should certainly let this compiler build far more interesting things.  Although unless you really need 2003, you really ought to look at newer stuff.  Unless you like really old stuff, then as a reminder the Win32s 1.1 SDK includes the version 8.00 compiler from 1993 as well.  You can download it from here: win32s-1.1-build-88-msvc32sdev.7z 

SDL 1.2.15 not working with Visual Studio 2003 (2002, 6, 97..)

Well yeah fun errors like this:

SDL “error LNK2001: unresolved external symbol __alloca_probe_16”

What gives? well the binary kit was built using 2005 (I guess) something higher.

Download and link against SDL-devel-1.2.13-VC6.zip and all will be happy.  I suppose you could build the source yourself, but who’s got time for that?

And remember to set your project to use the Multi Threaded DLL libc, otherwise you’ll get errors like this:

LNK2005: __isctype already defined in LIBCMT.lib(isctype.obj)
LNK2005: _exit already defined in LIBCMT.lib(crt0dat.obj)

Ok?

 

SimH 3.8 is out!

A new version of SIMH has been released!

You can check it out here. I’ve been on the road so no new compiles of it just yet, but I’ll do what I can.

At the moment I’m on an old computer that Visual C++ express 2008 is out of the question on running. A while ago there was the Microsoft Visual C++ Toolkit 2003, which has been nearly impossible to track down until I found its real name was VCToolkitSetup.exe

Using filewatcher, I managed to score a copy!

Check file watcher:

I’ve just downloaded it, so I have no idea how much other stuff I need to get to get it going, but I’m thinking a VC 2003 build of the exe’s along with HX DOS for the MS-DOS users ought to provide a good solution. HX DOS is awesome as it does what Pharlap TNT did back in the day, but it does more! And it’s free, no insane fee schedules like Pharlap TNT had… Frankly Pharlap slit their own throats by making their product so expensive. If it had been CHEAP/Free to developers, and cheap for distribution odds are nobody would be running windows…

Anyways for whatever reason, I get people downloading the MS-DOS builds of simh, and I figure this will make a good compromise as they can run the same build as everyone else. Looking at this refrence It should be possible to write a network driver using the old packet interface to have simh on MS-DOS live on the network… I’m not sure if I’ll actually do it, as I don’t know if people would want it… But then I’m still amazed that there are MS-DOS downloads from sourceforge… 22 of them, and I swear it’s not me!

Also I spotted this while it’s in Japanese I think it has some kind of guide and some simple examples of a ‘text mode’ windows program… It may be a good thing for some ancient windows/Windows CE simh stuff…

Just a thought at the moment, I can’t promise much.