Binaries for win98/linux-generic

[Crass Spektakel]

Are there any official binaries beyond 1.8.0 for Windows 98 and linux-generic?

Last Saturday we planned an old school lan party with Duke and OpenTTD and such. To avoid lugging around lots of computers we planned on using some old Windows 98 and Linux systems dated 2005-2010 from my basement. But obviously there are no longer working binaries and we were not exactly interested in updating these old systems.

(For the archives, 1.8.0 worked very well and doesn't differ much from 1.9.2. But if we want to do this event again in 2030 we might run into problems because OpenTTD 4.5 will surelly have some great new features like VR support, space ships, robot armies and cake and we do not want to stay at 1.8.0 forever).

[Eddi]

we discontinued our old compile farm after 1.8.0, and with that, some of the configurations for compile targets got "lost". i wouldn't count on win98 support coming back, there's a growing discrepancy between how modern a compiler needs to be to compile the ever evolving source code vs. how old of a target system you can compile for.

linux-generic might come back, but it needs a careful consideration on which libraries are available for static compilation, and how old of a runtime library you can target, plus the work to actually set up the compile environment. so there's no guarantee when this will happen. it's not really a high priority task, as the download numbers for these generally was kinda low. anyway, expecting to run this hypothetical version on something older than debian-oldstable would be unwise.

[jfs]

I think it's more likely we'll end up making an official Flatpak, Snap, or similar self-contained package for Linux, than a new "generic" build.