Delphi was one of the fastest ways to build Windows desktop applications through the 1990s and 2000s. A huge number of Australian businesses built mission-critical systems in Delphi — and many are still running them today, without anyone who can maintain them.

The Delphi problem

Borland released Delphi in 1995 and it quickly became a favourite for building complex, data-driven desktop applications. Order management systems, job costing tools, client management platforms, custom ERP — Delphi developers built them all.

The problem today:

• Delphi developers are hard to find and expensive to hire
• The original developer has retired, changed careers, or is simply unavailable
• Source code may never have been handed over
• The Delphi IDE versions needed to compile older code are no longer readily available
• 32-bit Delphi applications are under increasing pressure from 64-bit Windows

The business still runs. The software still mostly works. But something has broken, or needs to change, and there’s nobody to call.

What I do

I analyse your Delphi application — with or without source code — and produce documentation that makes the system recoverable and modernization achievable.

• Architecture documentation — forms, units, data modules, and how they connect
• Database schema analysis — tables, relationships, stored procedures
• Business rule extraction — calculations, validation logic, workflow rules
• Identification of third-party components and dependencies
• Modernization options — rewrite in a modern stack, re-platform, or wrap
• Migration plan with realistic effort and risk assessment

Common situations

The inherited system. A business acquired another company and inherited Delphi software nobody on the team understands. It runs, but it’s a black box — and it needs to keep running.

The unsupported version. The application was built in Delphi 5 or Delphi 7 and uses components that no longer compile in modern versions. Moving it forward requires understanding what it does first.

The Windows compatibility crisis. A Windows upgrade broke something — a component stopped working, a print driver changed, something with the runtime. There’s no developer to call.

What I need

• Access to the running application (preferred) or the executable
• Source code if available — even partial, even without the IDE to compile it
• Any documentation, however incomplete
• A conversation with someone who knows how the application is used

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