I work at a state school, and support the special services/needs department periodically. Part of this department is supporting the psychometrists who do the student testing for two rural counties.
Here’s my situation:
I was called in today to help one of the psychometrist’s with a new program they were implementing. (She couldn’t figure out how to get it to run.) To my horror I discovered it was a GW-BASIC program for DOS. (Our entire network is Windows XP.) I wrote a batch file and set up a shortcut on her start menu so she could access this program in a command prompt window.
The immediate response will probably be to find this program in a more modern, graphic version. But this program, which is used to create a report that is used to determine whether a child has developmental difficulties, is completely sole source, only from the developer (a PhD expert in psychological testing), and exists no where else. Its basically all or nothing here.
Here’s my question:
Is it possible to take this GW-BASIC program and compile or translate it so it is more “modern” and/or graphical? Does Visual Basic or equivalent allow for import of GW-BASIC files and recompile them into an executable for Windows?
Understand that I am NOT a programmer, but a hardware guy. I may be trying to get into something that is totally beyond me. I am trying to make life a little easier on the psychometists, but I may be wasting my time too.
Ideas/Opinions?