Re: [MiNT] Re[3]: usage of wind_calc()

[Evan Langlois <Evan@CoolRunningConcepts.com>]

On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 15:54 -0700, Frederic Fouche wrote:
> even from XP sp1 to sp2, many applications stopped working, those have
> to be upgraded.

Yes, Windows is crap.  I can't argue there.  One upgrade can kill
anything.  I don't use Windows, and won't use it.  Why?  I already told
you - I don't believe in reboots.
 
> I have many games that ran perfectly fine in win98, (a race car game),
> when I went to windows XP, NO WORKY anymore!  went to the vendors site

Windows 98 is Win32 running on DOS.  Windows XP uses the NT kernel.
They are vastly different.  The same with OS 9 vs OS X - they are
totally different systems with completely different APIs, and they used
a virtual machine layer to accomplish them both running at once.  We may
look into using virtual machine tricks if we have to.  However, we're
not talking about that level of change.  In the commercial world of
Windows, I think they WANT applications to break so that you have to buy
the upgrade.

>  who did NOT have patches and forum users were aware of windows XP and
> that game compatibility.  What do they do if they want to run it?
> run windows 98. that's IT!, end of story, they need to reboot to
> switch from XP to w98.

Thats one solution, yes.  However, the designers of Windows XP never
intended for this to be the case.  I'm not doubting that some older apps
will never run under XaAES - there are plenty that are so broken as they
would need their own virtual machine to tame them.  If someone wants to
ue a boot menu for that, fine.  I'm not saying they can't.  I'm saying
that it is not good policy to say "reboot to another OS to use older
apps".  As much compatibility as possible should remain, and no new
features should intentionally break an existing app.

> I had blown my win98 partition, so no more game for me. 

Games are notorious for not being well behaved, especially on systems
that don't have well defined game APIs.  I'm sure Word for Windows 95 or
even 3.11 will likely still run under XP.  Since XP has better and
better APIs for games, this will be less of a factor in the future.

Still, to say that we don't have to worry about compatibility because
the user can reboot to another OS is NOT a solution I'll accept.