Using TurboPower Products
with Delphi 4 Pro

TurboPower made some excellent tools that I have used through the years in both Turbo Pascal and Borland Delphi.  These are no longer available as commercial products, but they have been released to the public trust and are available and maintained at SourceForge.net - just search for TurboPower to find a list of all the available toolboxes.

There are some issues with installing these to work with most versions of Delphi.  Personally, I can only vouch for Delphi 4 Professional, but in reading some of the help forums for the projects, I see it applies to other versions as well.

My solution was gleaned from various posts on the help forums - I post it here mostly for my personal benefit as someday I'm sure I will have to do this again and won't have to rely on my feeble brain to remember this - others may benefit from it as well.

1. After UnZipping the TurboPower package, the first thing to do is to remove the READ ONLY file attribute on all the files.

2. Next, copy the contents of the PACKAGES folder to the SOURCE folder. I then chose to delete the PACKAGES folder completely.

3. Open Delphi, and then open the appropriate Design Time Package - using the Orpheus toolbox as an example - the file I need for Delphi 4 is named O406_d40.dpk

4. After loading the file into Delphi, a window opens titled "Package - O406_d40.dpk" - here I click the Compile button to compile the project

5. Next, click the INSTALL button to actually install the package.

6. Some posts in the help forums then suggest copying the run-time packages to your Windows\System folder - what I did was simply modify my path statement to include the folder where the packages are installed.

I have several TurboPower toolboxes on my system - all are located in C:\TPOWER with each toolbox in a separate folder

C:\TPOWER contains
  abbrevia
  async
  btf556
  essentials
  onguard
  orpheus
  systools

Each of those toolbox folders contains several files/folders - the two folders of interest to us are the packages and source folders - like I said, copy the contents of the packages folder to the source folder - I then deleted the packages folder.

Anyway - next I set the PATH environment variable - using XP Home, load the Control Panel, the select the Performance and Maintenance category, then select the System applet.

In the System Dialog, select the Advanced Tab, and then the button near the bottom named Environment Variables - on my system a PATH variable already existed, so I just selected it and clicked EDIT to add to it,  My path variable is set as follows:

C:\PROGRA~1\Borland\Delphi4\Bin;c:\tpower\orpheus\source;c:\tpower\btf556\source;
c:\tpower\async\source;c:\tpower\abbrevia\source;c:\tpower\essentials\source;
c:\tpower\onguard\source;c:\tpower\systools\source;

NOTE: I word wrapped this here for formatting purposes - in the System dialog it is all on one line

Windows XP stores Environment variables in the registry, so I don't think length is an issue - at least it hasn't been so far, but I could be wrong about that and have not tried to make it so long that XP chokes.

A note about all this - I never had any problems installing these toolboxes, and as long I didn't quit Delphi, I was fine. Reloading Delphi was where my problem was, and after doing all this, I no longer get the error when reloading Delphi about packages not being found. 

HTH & Best Regards,
mikro