Unicode

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SebHoll

Win98 SE and WinME support unicode if the additional package is installed. But they are officially abandoned so I don't think the download still exists at Microsoft.com
The package does not do much more than add some modified Win2k / XP libraries.

Yep - that's the MSLU, it helps with the MaxGUI module, but it isn't the answer to all things Unicode by any means.

Also, it means that a unicows.dll will have to be distributed with compiled EXEs if they want them to run on Windows 9X/Me. In addition, the licensing terms for unicows.dll isn't actually that great - so perhaps the open source Opencow library could be used... Fortunately, either are compatible with libunicows which is an open-source MinGW library for MSLU implementation.

Don't know if this influences the filenames or not thought.

Herein lies another problem which I'm looking into now - for Unicode support, the Windows FileSystem module may have to be rewritten to use Windows API commands instead of C functions to maintain the compatability with Windows 9X/Me.

I don't give much on the selfcrashing OS generation (Win98 / ME) with their highly broken memory management.

Ditto - but a lot of people don't agree with us on that one.

It would be great if BM internally would use $w and add a a ?Win9X compiler directive to allow the addition of stone age methods for the stone age OS :)

That's effectively what my hack is - apart from it would be impractical to have a ?Win9X compiler directive (we don't want to change behaviour when the code is compiled on Windows 9X, instead we want it to run differently at runtime on Windows 9X, regardless of where it has been compiled ).

Just out of curiosity, how many people still use Windows 9X? The BlitzMax product page advertises support for Windows 98/ME - ho, hum!