a blog? a diary? an abort of my mind? nobody knows...
22 Sep 2005
Win9x kicked out and related project
Who still uses Windows 98/98SE (like me) or ME has noticed that lately
almost all the recent games don't work on this OS.
Sometimes the problems are not only in the execution of the games but
also in their installer and this last thing smells a bit.
In my tests I noticed that usually the incompatibility is caused by
functions like SHGetFolderPathA which is located in Shfolder.dll that
is not linked in the game executable.
I thought shfolder.dll should work transparently like a piece of
shell32.dll but seems I was wrong.
I wanted to start a project for allowing the running of the recent
games on Win9x too but there are still some things not clear.
Some examples of these games are Doom3 (some guys released a fixer as
many know), Close Combat First to Fight, Battlefield 2, Starship
Troopers, Act of War, Swat 4 and many others that (as already said)
have been released recently.
If someone has suggestions I'm interested to know them, for the moment
the only thing I tested but doesn't work enough was the usage of dll
bridges able to link the functions of the old original dll plus all
those missed but with shell32.dll this lame work-around doesn't work.
Oh I have tried also to build the dll with the static libraries
created from shell32.dll and shfolder.dll but also this solution
doesn't work at the moment.