Bye-bye Win98, we will miss you(?)

Always read the fine print. Every now and again something comes around that catches you out... Late last year I upgraded my development environment to Visual Studio 2008 and the latest Windows WDK. With that I converted the PPJoy source to VS 2008 projects, did a couple of regression tests, and everything looked fine. The catch? I never tested on Windows 98...

On Monday, as I was testing the new PPJoy installer on Windows 98 only to discover my executables won't run on Windows 98. A quick google later I am reading the compiler release notes specifying that VS 2008 only supports Windows 2000 and later.

So that settles it then: PPJoy will no longer support Windows 98. I could try to hack some support together but frankly the time is spent better elsewhere...

Hacking the new installer

I am currently hacking the new installer for PPJoy, moving from the old InstallerVise to the Nullsoft installer. At the same time I am busy converting the installer plug-ins to the new NSIS format. Getting stuff to compile is quick and easy (or it should be!) . Understanding the environment in which the is running is something entirely different... I don't want the installer to be unstable!

Which brings me to the next point... how much effort do you put into backwards compatibility? The method for installing/configuring a Control Panel is different between Win98, Win2K, XP and Vista... there are unique settings for each one of the. Win98, in particular (surprise?), is very different from the NT family.

It is very tempting to drop Windows 98... How many of these systems are still out there?

printf ("Hello World!\n");

Hello World!

I've decided to start a small blog to keep everybody informed about what is happening with PPJoy. Beware that the log will probably not be updated all that frequently... less often than I work on PPJoy :-)

I hope to share my plans for PPJoy (features, etc) and possibly get some feedback on them. Tell me what you would like to see in PPJoy. No promises of course!

This blog is definitely not a support forum, sorry. If you discover bugs in PPJoy I'd like to hear about them but unfortunately I cannot help you with general setup questions,  nor do I promise to fix all bugs.