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

[Travis Howell]

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.