win9x installer for Win2k and WinXP

[Darkvater]

I've been looking through the commit logs and found the following:

-Fix-ish [FS#4749]: let Windows 2000 and XP without service pack 3 use the win9x binary/installer; the newer MSVC compiler of the compile farm does not support those versions of Windows anymore

If I remember correctly the Win9x binary did not support Unicode. Does this mean that from now on we also use Unicode compatibility for Windows 2000 and Windows XP? It does not affect me because I've never played OpenTTD on anything else but English but I can imagine it becoming an issue for some. Would be a shame if this were the case

[FooBar]

I think there are very little Win2000 users (and if so they should really consider getting a more modern operating system). XP users are fine as long as they have SP3, which is also recommended for the latest security updates. So maybe 10 people will be effected by this?

[planetmaker]

If I remember correctly the Win9x binary did not support Unicode. Does this mean that from now on we also use Unicode compatibility for Windows 2000 and Windows XP? It does not affect me because I've never played OpenTTD on anything else but English but I can imagine it becoming an issue for some. Would be a shame if this were the case

Unicode support has not been added there.

OpenTTD binaries for windows XP supported unicode for long (as you could run the 'normal' windoze binary on it).

But from now on you need at least XP SP3 in order to have unicode support as the 'normal' binaries won't run on older XP versions anymore; For older versions of XP you'll thus have to do without unicode support. the reason lies in the fact that the new MSVC used for compilation produces binaries which won't run on earlier versions of windows. We consider that uncritical since those windows versions are unsupported by MS for a long time now.

[Rubidium]

The problem lies mostly in libicu. They do only provide a MSVC 2010 project file, which isn't trivially converted to a 2008 or 2005 project file; for earlier versions just changing the version number in the file did the trick.

The change to the compile farm has been done long ago and several release candidates had been made with it new compiler. Only days after the release someone came up that the binary did not work on 2000 anymore. To date I remember seeing two or three people who had this problem, which is a really insignificant amount. Especially as for all cases they said the win9x version worked fine, so they did not need the unicode version.

So the question is: should we prevent bugfixes and ICU improvements from almost everybody, or should we spend many hours rebuilding part of the compile farm for the hypothetical Windows 2000 user that requires unicode? In this case I'd even argue that they should compile it themselves. After all, we don't make binaries for the few BSD users of OpenTTD.

[michael blunck]

Not Found

The requested URL /pub/games/openttd/binaries/nightlies/trunk/r22927/openttd-trunk-r22927-windows-win9x.zip was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at ftp.snt.utwente.nl Port 80

regards
Michael

[Eddi]

no such problem with the german mirror

[Transportman]

Not Found

The requested URL /pub/games/openttd/binaries/nightlies/trunk/r22927/openttd-trunk-r22927-windows-win9x.zip was not found on this server.
Apache/2.2.16 (Debian) Server at ftp.snt.utwente.nl Port 80

regards
Michael

That is a problem with the entire mirror, other OS versions are also unavailable for the latest nightly. Apparently the mirror didn't get the last nightly...

[tristanb]

I think there are very little Win2000 users (and if so they should really consider getting a more modern operating system). XP users are fine as long as they have SP3, which is also recommended for the latest security updates. So maybe 10 people will be effected by this?

Hang on. What's wrong with Windows 2000?

I'm still using it, and it's great. It's incredibly fast on modern hardware, doesn't have a whole lot of superfluous crap like fading/alpha/blurring windows. Nowadays, we do most things on the internet, and the OS doesn't really matter.

I don't see much point in updating (I'd only go to XP) just so I can use up space, RAM and processing power just for some ugly eye candy.

[Supercheese]

I don't see much point in updating (I'd only go to XP) just so I can use up space, RAM and processing power just for some ugly eye candy.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't newer OSes required to use newer versions of DirectX (like 10 & 11)? If you want to run games that benefit from newer versions of DirectX, that would be a pretty good reason to upgrade, methinks...

[/offtopic]

[tristanb]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't newer OSes required to use newer versions of DirectX (like 10 & 11)? If you want to run games that benefit from newer versions of DirectX, that would be a pretty good reason to upgrade, methinks...

You're probably right. I've only got DirectX 9. Fortunately Transport Tycoon is the most modern game on my computer!

[spaces]

I'm running my OTTD server on win2k, too. Without any problem.