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

[Travis Howell]

On 6/03/2016 1:58 AM, Arnaud Boutonné wrote:
> Instead of dropping support directly, would it be possible to split
> it in two, one for pre-XP and one for XP and later? This way, we
> could improve the post-XP as you described, and see how many
> downloads we have for the pre-XP package.

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. Windows 9x/ME support currently requires a much older
tool chain, since more libraries are dropping Windows 9x/ME support over
time. Older versions of GCC, FLAC, and Inno Setup are currently required.

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.

On 6/03/2016 2:02 AM, M. Kiewitz wrote:
> We really should check first how many downloads there actually are.
> Kind Regards

Too late for ScummVM 1.8.0, as the Windows build covers all Windows
systems. I will try using the Windows snapshot as a test in mean time,
to see how long it takes for Windows 9x/ME breakage to be reported, if
at all. The current tool chain (mingw-w64) on buildbot only supports
Windows 2000 onwards too.

On 6/03/2016 7:55 AM, Miguel de Dios Matias wrote:
> I only wonder any thing.
>
> How many lines of code will have to be erased?
>
> I want a clean open source projects.

There is only a small amount of Windows 9x/ME code to handle the ScummVM
config file, and detect when the taskbar feature shouldn't be used.
Looks like around 22 lines of code could be removed.