Help for Mac newbie with running a simple Windows .exe please

[cold_mountain]

I know next to nothing about Macs so would appreciate some help from those of you that do.

I have developed a database front end to a remote MySQL database for use by an association I belong to. I wrote this in Delphi 2009 on a Windows PC and it exists as a single .exe file. (Roughly all it does is send out SQL over the Internet in response to menu choices, gets data back and reports it on screen, maybe to a printer.)

A couple of my users have Macs so I want to see if I can get some sort of emulation to work. I think I need to use something like Wine or Wine Bottler to create a file I can send to them that they can run on their machines.

I have bought an old Apple PowerMac G5, 3.5GB RAM, 160 GB HDD, running Leopard 10.5.8 to experiment with.

Can anyone tell me if I will be able to run Wine Bottler on this machine, have any chance of running my windows application within it and be able to produce a file that will run on other Macs?

Also my understanding is that Wine Bottler produces a sort of 'stand alone' application file that I could send to my Mac users. Is this correct?

 

[Ember1205]

Without knowing the exact calls and hooks that the EXE requires from Windows, there's no way to know whether you could package it into a version that could be run on the Mac.

If you're the original author of the utility, maybe you should consider building a web application and deploying that either in addition to, or in place of, the windows-only program that you have now.

 

[chscag]

Can anyone tell me if I will be able to run Wine Bottler on this machine, have any chance of running my windows application within it and be able to produce a file that will run on other Macs?

I don't believe that WINE or Wine Bottler will run on a PPC machine. You need to check that first as your G5 is not an Intel machine. A G5 was not a very good choice to purchase for testing; an inexpensive Intel machine would have been much better. BTW, Windows apps need an Intel machine in order to run whether you're dual booting with Boot Camp or using virtual software such as VirtualBox or Parallels. There was a way to run Windows on a PPC machine but watching paint dry on a barn was faster. ;D

 

[cold_mountain]

I don't believe that WINE or Wine Bottler will run on a PPC machine. You need to check that first as your G5 is not an Intel machine. A G5 was not a very good choice to purchase for testing; an inexpensive Intel machine would have been much better. BTW, Windows apps need an Intel machine in order to run whether you're dual booting with Boot Camp or using virtual software such as VirtualBox or Parallels. There was a way to run Windows on a PPC machine but watching paint dry on a barn was faster. ;D

Yes, after trying it out you are correct. Looks like the G5 is going back on ebay! I have now bought a mac mini with the Intel cpu. I seems to have managed to get winebottler to do something as at least my app starts up on the mac but it won't connect to the remote database. I'll have to do some more investigation. My app does create a diagnostics log file, which on the PC would be in the app data folder, but I don't know how to see any log files that might be created on a mac under wine as I don't know where to look. Mac apps seem to be rather black boxes -). Still, its a start - and one more mac user! Thanks for the replies