Thanks a lot, Ian, you are making me a very happy person! And yes, the VM bit too, please
And take your time
Ok, for the VM stuff I can do a few different things, initially the easiest is to point you to links which explain what to do and where to get the stuff you need, for your OS. Windows only.
Microsoft makes this bit called "XP Mode", along with "Virtual PC", and you will need both of those.
I am sorry non-Windows users, but I cannot legally make a VirtualBox/VMWare image of XP SP3, and it wouldn't work anyway for this from what I can tell because of the subsystem that it will not have [and VPC does] which FE Compiler needs because of that blastedly infernal PIF file. If someone out there knows what happened to the FE authors after all that crap went down in Ukraine, and can hook me up with them, then I can get a source license and rebuild the stupid little demon-spawned file to point to correct x64 resources, or just rewrite that bit. But so far as I know, no one who had the opportunity to buy a source license ever did, or they never chose to tell anyone at least.
If push comes to shove and folks cannot sort out the two sets of instructions I link to, I may be able to find enough time to whip up a Word doc walkthrough, but you see my response time is not anything that could be called with any amount of reasonable creative license either "fast" or "responsive".
They are intended for Windows 7 Professional or better, but *will* work under 8+...it is just rather more annoying to set it up, and you need to enable Hyper-V [so your hardware needs to support this].
Virtual PC:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3702XP Mode:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8002TechNet Documentation, for Windows 7 use:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681737(v=ws.10).aspxDocumentation for Win8-10 use:
http://www.download3k.com/articles/How-to-add-an-XP-Mode-Virtual-Machine-to-Windows-10-or-8-using-Hyper-V-00770I cannot offer tech support for this stuff, and if you mess things up and your computer runs off and starts murdering folks, it isn't on me.
You are entirely on your own with support and liability, I'm afraid.
My advice, is that if you do not understand what you are reading, it is best to ask in some appropriate forum [MS or one of the ones in the Stack Overflow network] and/or hit up YouTube [the cesspool that it is].
Ian