narf -
From your statements I get the impression that you don't have experience programming in c++, and possibly not much experience programming at all. C++ pretty much assumes you know exactly what you are doing, and isn't very forgiving if you don't. That said, with time, patience, determination, something to experiment on (seldome an issue with programming, as the tools are all totally reuseable under most circumstances), and a good manual just about anyone can learn just about anything. This does include C++. Fortunately, C++ is a rather popular computer language, and so there are a great many tutorials out there, of varying quality but free of charge.
Here is one index of some of them. Be prepared to do a lot of reading if you want to master the language.
That said, I suspect one problem is likely one of variable names. Different implementations of compilers will often have different names for the same variable types (e.g. one might call a 16 bit signed integer a "shortint" while another might call that an "int16"). If that is the problem, it can likely be taken care of with some simple define or typedef statements at the beginning of the code. What exactly those statements would need to be is dependant on the compiler you are using and the conventions used in the source you are working with.