Running Delphi compiled exe's on 386 processor board

Hi,

I'm pretty much a newbie to Delphi, although I once did a fair bit of Pascal programming back in the dim and distant 80's. So far it's been a pretty good experience, but I've got a problem I just can't find any information on in any Delphi books.

I have a number of in house developed utilities we use in the (very small) company I work for. These have been developed in house on Delphi 6 or Delphi 7. These are all pretty small utilities (geodetic library, RS232 handling/ formatting apps etc). For reasons of convenience/ portability, we are trying to get these apps runnning on a small i386 based single board computer. The problem is, none of the Delphi 6/7 compiled exe's will run on the i386 single board PC. This is the case even for the most simple form/button/ "Hello world" test program. The same code complied in Delphi 4 works fine on the i386 board. The Delphi 6/7 compiled code runs fine on a 486 board. I can't simply recompile every utility on Delphi 4 ( or at least not easily). The error is always " Illegal instruction at 000000 in 0000000" . Note that the code is being compiled on a newish P4 system. Does Delphi compile based on the development PC processor ( i.e. is it by default compiling for a P4 processor, which might explain the problem running the same code on a 386 processor?) Everything I have read seems to say that it should run on a 386 or later processor ok. There is no extensive maths being used, or I would suspect the lack of a maths co-processor as having something to do with it. The 386 single board PC doesn't have the memory of (flash) hard disk space to compile the units on the target PC.

Any help or suggestions, folks?

I certainly don't have experience directly with what you're asking about, as I use only C++ builder 6. In that environment, though, there is a way to change compiler options:
Project->Options and click the Advanced Compiler tab. On this tab, I can select the instruction set to use: 386, 486, pentium, etc. If your environment works the same way, you might check your settings on that tab. Hope this helps.