>A client had a workstation unexpectedly decide to quit. On that machine was a 3+ year old application that used a Watcom SQL engine to look at the data.
>
>File: PATIENT.DB - hex dumped the header on the file to confirm it had Watcom copyrights.
>
>The application was restored from a backup but would not run on the new machine.
>
>The original installation diskettes do not install. Read error.
>
>The company is out of business.
>
>I need the ability to extract the information out of the file. I could hex the file and map it but that would not be an inexpensive solution to extract this information. It contains minimal patient information along with a report.
>

Your best bet is probably to obtain an ODBC driver for the Watcom engine, and use that to extract the structure, create an equivalent Fox DBF, and import the data on a one time basis. I believe that the Watcom engine was used by a number of products, including PowerBuilder, as their "native" data engine; it became the basis for Sybase's SQL Anywhere product, but there's no guarentee that the SQL Anywhere engine will work with the Watcom database.

You might hunt around for someone with an older copy of PowerBuilder (I think version 3 still used the Watcom engine) if you can't locate a vendor for an ODBC driver. It's possible that the old package used ODBC; check to see if there;s an ODBC driver in the original package, and try installing that and creating a DSN using the ODBC Administrator applet. I know that Evergreen's EasyER product used the Watcom engine, and was able to reverse-engineer Watcom databases, but it's an expensive product in its current incarnation, and the current version of it uses SQL Anywhere to store its metadata, and it didn't offer data export facilities (it's a data modelling tool; it could analyse the structure of a database and create equivalent databases in a number of formats, including VFP's, but it didn't have a data migration service built into it.)

You might try contacting Sybase if other avenues are exhausted; they might be able to sell you a current product and "downgrade" it to provide the older software (MS does the same kind of thing when people need to but an old, no longer supported product like FPW 2.6 of VFP 3 - they sell you VFP 6 and then provide you with the older product.)