Constructing a working copy of SCORE 4 – software preservation

SCORE is a historical music engraving program written by Professor Leland Smith and developed from 1987 to 2002. It was known for its high-quality results compared to other software available at the time, and its output inspired the Leland music font developed for MuseScore. The last version of SCORE, version 4, retailed for US$825 on release in 1999 (equivalent to US$1500 in 2023).

To the author's knowledge, no full version of SCORE has been successfully publicly archived for preservation, though copies undoubtedly continue to remain in private ownership.

A working version of SCORE 4.01, though incomplete and anachronistic, can be constructed based on demos and update files which have been successfully archived. I thank sealsrock12 on the WinWorld forums for the tipoff.

We can accomplish this by first installing (e.g. in DOSBox) SCORPREV – a read-only demo version of SCORE 3.11, which was able to be publicly redistributed. It is now somewhat difficult to find a working copy, so I have taken the liberty of archiving this at https://archive.org/details/scorprev.

C:\>CD PATH\TO\SCORPREV
C:\PATH\TO\SCORPREV>MKDIR ADRIVE
C:\PATH\TO\SCORPREV>MOUNT A ADRIVE
C:\PATH\TO\SCORPREV>SETUP-A

We can then download and install SCORE 4 update packages from the archived SCORE website to obtain the latest SCORE 4 binaries.

C:\SCORE>C:\PATH\TO\DR4
C:\SCORE>C:\PATH\TO\J4
C:\SCORE>C:\PATH\TO\PG4
C:\SCORE>C:\PATH\TO\SC4
C:\SCORE>C:\PATH\TO\SCLAS
C:\SCORE>CD HLP
C:\SCORE\HLP>C:\PATH\TO\MENUHLP
C:\SCORE>CD ..\LIB
C:\SCORE\LIB>C:\PATH\TO\MENULIB

SCORE 4 expects a data file titled scr4_00.dat, so as a bodge, we rename the SCORE 3 data file to this name. SCORE 4 also expects its installation directory to be called SCOR4 rather than SCORE as in SCORE 3, so we rename this as well. We can then run SCOR4 as required.

C:\SCORE\LIB>RENAME SCOR3_10.DAT SCR4_00.DAT
C:\SCORE\LIB>CD ..\..
C:\>RENAME SCORE SCOR4
C:\>CD SCOR4
C:\SCOR4>SCOR4

We can follow a simple demonstration from the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities at Stanford University to produce an example PDF: