Chief Architect, bless their hearts, is telling everyone that has license to their older versions that they must update to a later version of their software with the newer operating systems like Windows 7, 8, and 10. Hey, that just makes good business sense if you are a big software developer. You don’t want folks to keep using the older versions if they’re developing new ones. In my case, I have a license to Chief Architect 8. I like it. I don’t want to upgrade just yet. It’s what I’m used to and it works just fine. Actually, I think that version 8 works better than the newer versions. Just my opinion.
After spending weeks looking for a solution to Chief 8 not working on my new machine and asking several “experts” about how to fix the problem with no success, I finally took matters into my own hands. I started thinking that if I wanted to run an older software, why not look for the older drivers that actually made my program work in the older system. We have been told by most of the “experts” that if you run your programs on a newer system with a newer operating system, you must have the newest drivers. I followed that advice but kept hitting dead ends.
In my case, it was the dongle key that Chief looked for to accept my license serial number. Mine is a HASP4 dongle that connects to a LPT port on my computer. Yeah, I know the LPT ports are ancient but again, if you want to use the old software, you need to implement the hardware drivers that originally worked when the program was running on Windows 98, XP, or Vista.
You first need to make sure that the newer drivers are removed from your system by going into Control Panel and uninstalling them. Look for Aladdin or HASP installations. Once this is done, download the original HASP4 driver from https://www.driverguide.com/driver/detail.php?driverid=618159 and install it. You can do a search on Google or Bing for HASP4_driver_setup.zip if it’s no longer at the above url. With the new drivers gone and the original in place, everything worked just fine and Chief Architect 8 was at my disposal once again. I was back in business…
If all else fails for you, I’ve kept a copy of the HASP4_driver_setup.zip. Just contact me by commenting to this article below.
Tim Davis is a veteran general draftsman who has several drafting courses online at his Online Drafting School at http://draftingschool.net.
