[Scummvm-devel] Dropping Windows 9x/ME support

[Filippos Karapetis]

If we are forced to use ancient toolchains to maintain support for Win9x,
then I fully support the idea of dropping support for this platform
altogether, or to create a separate toolchain just for this.

After all, we have a separate toolchain and build target for the old OS X
builds (although these are BE...).

I really don't think that anyone is using Win9x any more, other than in
really ancient PCs. Nowadays, you can get a Raspberry Pi 3 for $35 or a
Raspberry Pi Zero for $5, so there's really no compelling reason to use
ancient hardware with Win9x these days.

If you're still doubtful, do a web search for OS usage, e.g. this wikipedia
article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems

If you read stats on Windows version usage, you'll see that anything older
than XP is basically non-existent nowadays (and for good reason). Also,
there isn't any decent browser that works under Windows 9x any more:
http://www.cnet.com/forums/discussions/modern-browsers-for-windows-98-systems-363040/

So, again the only hardware that people would run ScummVM with Win9x would
be very (very) old 486 or Pentium PCs with 32MB of RAM, but you can get a
system that's many orders of magnitude faster than that for $5 (Raspberry
Pi Zero).

Thus, I really don't see why we should maintain support for operating
systems that are 18-21 years old now, and noone's using them, since there
are tons of very cheap and vastly superior alternative options.

Regards
Filippos

On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 5:59 AM, Travis Howell <kirben at optusnet.com.au>
wrote:

> On 6/03/2016 10:08 PM, Eugene Sandulenko wrote:
> > On 5 March 2016 at 23:48, Travis Howell <kirben at optusnet.com.au
> > <mailto:kirben at optusnet.com.au>> wrote:
> >
> >     Only for release builds, and only if no major code changes are
> required
> >     for continued Windows 9x/ME support. I would have to provide the
> >     additional build, as I doubt buildbot has the disk space for another
> >     large tool chain.
> > We have 2 buildbots now (another one is in preps), and that another one
> > has twice disk space that our main one. Thus, if it is possibble to set
> > up a chain, that would be lovely.
>
> Basically the tool chain and extra libraries offered on the current
> MinGW compile guide on the ScummVM wiki, but I doubt they could be just
> swapped into a cross-compiler environment.
>
> >     I don't think this will be viable in the long term though, since
> ScummVM
> >     will move to SDL2 in the future, which completely lacks any support
> for
> >     Windows 9x/ME.
> >
> > We are discussing switching to SDL2 as primary backend, but there are no
> > plans to drop SDL1 support, thus some ports like Win9x/ME, could still
> > use SDL1.
>
> That is good to know, as it would make future builds for Windows 9x/ME
> much easier, if they were to continue for release builds.
>
> > Can we now try to do the following:
> >
> > As I understand it is matter of toolchain, so we mark current build as
> > Win95/ME+, then create another build with the new toolchain, and name it
> > scummvm-1.8.0a, and mark is as WinXP+. By doing this now we could start
> > gathering statistics on downloads already now, and by 1.9.0 make an
> > informed decision.
>
> It would be best to wait for ScummVM 1.8.1, to be on the safe side. I
> just switched to updated tool chain (GCC 4.9.3) for MinGW, recompiling
> all required libraries due to ABI changes, and I would rather these
> builds have a little more overall testing.
>
>
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-- 
"Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes" - Oscar Wilde
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