W98/ME support removal

[PaulyQ]

Minous said:

But it would certainly be reasonable that bug fixes and compatibility improvements be incorporated into the Win98 version, there is no technical reason for this not to be done.

are you offering to do that... Toni is obviously very busy on the XP version.

[Minuous]

Sure. If I get sent the bug fixes I can incorporate them into the W98 version.

Re. running Linux, although it does run, unfortunately that's not really an option for me because eg, there is no TVGC emulator available for that platform.

[PaulyQ]

There we go then... talk to Toni re a Win98 port.

Hopefully job sorted.

[Anubis]

Originally Posted by Belgarath

Anyone happy to use a 10 year old OS should be happy to use an old winuae.

and it's not as if winuae is a half finished beta, it does everything most people want already.

Exactly my thinking.

It's not like because of new WinUAE version is not going to support Win98 all previous version of WinUAE will stop working.

I still use Win98 on one of my (old) machines, but the same as I use WB3.0 and DOS6.22 - just for gaming. Also I emulate them all as well.

[Zetr0]

damn i was going to post this



Please note the Troll in the picture....

[Shoonay]

Is that smaller guy Toni, debugging the troll?

[NLS]

I entered this thread to post exactly the same (Belgarath's quote).

And to make myself "more bad": Why would a piece of software be "held back" for some people that refuse to come to the 21st century with the rest of us?

Want ultra-light-weight Windows? Use Win2000. I used to run Win2k SERVER on a Pentium Pro @200MHz machine with 64MB RAM. You know what I did with it? STREAM audio (from a radio card)! Yes it took 20 min to boot, yes it was in swap all the time, yes the stream was 10" delayed on the same LAN, but it worked.

[Anubis]

You should be punished for not using FreeBSD!

FreeBSD worked fine on Pentium 100MHz with 32MB RAM for me. It didn't take 20 minutes to load, nor it had any problems working as WEB server + storage server. Can't imagine, friend told me to use Win98 + Apache and in the end my server was working faster then his 'light' windows version. (That was in the time of FreeBSD version 4.x)

[Zetr0]

Lets take a functional few for a moment,

Windows 98 was designed and developed in 96-97 for things to come... now..

lets be serious here, according to some spark at intel the revision to Moore's law from 24 months to 18 months a doubling of the complexity of the technology..

now.... you can only patch an OS so far before it does become useless to maintain and its best to write from scratch, however trying to drag an OS past 6.6 exponential cycles of complexity doubling is asking a bit much... even MS wont support it anymore, that in itself should say a lot.

hmmm Pentium 233, 7.5 million transistors.... core duo = 410 Million Transistors....

yep..... thats a little exponential growth right there

[HenryCase]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Re. running Linux, although it does run, unfortunately that's not really an option for me because eg, there is no TVGC emulator available for that platform.

I'm not going to pretend that I know what a TVGC emulator is or why it is important. I do not see why Linux isn't good for you. You can have more than one OS on a machine at a time, so you could have Linux for Amiga stuff and Win 98 for the TVGC stuff.

Most (if not all) modern Linux distros even make setting up a dual boot machine very easy.

Minuous, ignore the rest of the people in this thread and go with Linux.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by HenryCase

I'm not going to pretend that I know what a TVGC emulator is or why it is important.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elektor_TV_Games_Computer

It's a homebrew dutch computer/console. A cloan of a commercial system known under various guises as Arcadia 2001, Interton VC4000 etc. It was pretty crap even by 8-bit standards.

It is opensource and could be easily ported to SDL in a few hours!

It had Signetics 2650 CPU and a Signetics 2637 video controller which are quite cool (from an archeological hardware point of view), different from the Z80/6502 that most other systems used.

[rare_j]

Why on earth would you want to emulate an amiga on windows 98??
Win 98 is properly and officially a retro OS itself, along with 3.11 and dos. Even microsoft don't want anything to do with it anymore.

[Minuous]

Not sure where you're getting your info from, but it doesn't seem to be from the link you quoted.

The TVGC (and VC 4000) use the 2636 chip which is radically different from the 2637. The TVGC is also different from the VC 4000 in several ways, eg. ROM, memory map, cassette interface, sound generators, randomizers, etc. are all implemented differently. In terms of it being "crap", I must disagree, in some ways this system was the most advanced of its time, as noted in the article.

Yes, the core could be ported to Linux but the GUI is comprehensive and uses the native capabilities of the host OS directly, rather than being limited to a "lowest common denominator" approach a la SDL. (Eg. the keyboard problems in DOSBox which are related to the use of SDL.) I have open sourced it to enable ports to Linux and Mac, among other reasons, but don't really have the time or inclination to do these ports myself, as there are already three official ports. I very much doubt that a port of the entire interface to SDL would be possible in a few hours without dropping a lot of functionality.

There are other also emus which would not run on Linux too. Eg. there is no 3DO emulator, no source for that (FreeDO) either, so no chance of it being ported.

>even MS wont support it anymore, that in itself should say a lot.

Not really, this only says that they are interested in forcing people to shell out money for a new OS and use their product activation and DRM crap. I don't see how the number of transistors has anything to do with it. Older software should run faster on newer machines, there is no need whenever upgrading hardware to effectively cancel out the speed increase and lose the ability to natively run hundreds of games by changing to a slower and less compatible OS.

By this reasoning OS3.5 support should be dropped, it is as old as Win98SE (1999). Never mind that it works as well as it always did.

[HenryCase]

@alexh
Thanks for the info. I did search on Google for TVGC emulator before I made my post, but Google popped up with a spelling suggestion so I wasn't sure whether TVGC was a typo.

@Minuous
Minuous, let me explain again how you can have your cake and eat it...

1. Install a minimal Linux distro on your Win 98 machine. DeLi Linux is supposed to be good for old PC hardware (even runs on a 386!):
http://delili.lens.hl-users.com/
2. Once installation completed (GRUB bootloader should be set up too), you have a choice. Either run E-UAE or run WinUAE through WINE. Here's a link showing the latter can be done:
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...ation&iId=5686
3. Whenever you want to run a TVGC emulator, select Windows 98 on the GRUB boot screen.

Simple.

[_Steve_]

Originally Posted by Minuous

By this reasoning OS3.5 support should be dropped, it is as old as Win98SE (1999). Never mind that it works as well as it always did.

That is a bit of a bad example really, since OS3.5 (as does 3.9) both use 3.1 SDK API. Nothing is specifically written to use 3.5 or 3.9 as they were essentially bug fixed 3.1 versions with some new replaced libraries extending the capabilities of WB (icon library for example).

[MazinKaesar]

BTW, I think Windows 98SE is the best Windows ever ^^

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by _Steve_

That is a bit of a bad example really, since OS3.5 (as does 3.9) both use 3.1 SDK API. Nothing is specifically written to use 3.5 or 3.9 as they were essentially bug fixed 3.1 versions with some new replaced libraries extending the capabilities of WB (icon library for example).

This is incorrect, there are many programs which require OS3.5 or higher, and others which require OS3.9 or higher. Revised NDKs were issued to document the new function calls. eg. AVL_AddNode(), WorkbenchControl(), also there are many new tags for existing functions.

>DeLi Linux is supposed to be good for old PC hardware (even runs on a 386!)

The hardware in question is a 2.4GHz P4, hardly old...

>BTW, I think Windows 98SE is the best Windows ever ^^

Agreed; although admittedly this is like comparing turds to see which smells the least bad :-)

[Anubis]

Stop crying!

Move to W2K, XP or Vista and use VirtualPC (free) to run emulator for TVGC.

I don't see a reason this should not work.

Other possibility, use Win98/XP dual boot.

You have huge possibilities, and of them you choose wrong one.

I disagree with the Toni's tone and the way he reply in this forum (I don't have that good memory and I don't check every forum Toni does, but it is rude to see his response here) but that is not a reason that you make this pointless debate.

Instead of asking Toni to continue supporting dead OS, ask maker of that other emu to keep up with the time.

[MazinKaesar]

Originally Posted by Minuous

>BTW, I think Windows 98SE is the best Windows ever ^^

Agreed; although admittedly this is like comparing turds to see which smells the least bad :-)

ROTFL!!!

[Ian]

Can I just point out I still find it hilarious when I read where he compared his emulator for the beast that is the Arcadia 2001 to WinUAE.