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Graf Zahl said:
Microsoft decided to remove DirectDraw from its SDK but ZDoom still references it. End result: You can't compile. Knowing part of this community's resistance to use modern computers removing this functionality is not an option.

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Delyon said:
In addition some modders cannot bear to expose their "brilliant" work to others.

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Quasar said:

You would probably find that this community is not very friendly to that sentiment at all

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natt said:


It's funny that you say that, because a lot of (not Doom) modding communities are the polar opposite. Person writes two and a half lines of trivial code and it's all ORIGINAL DO NOT STEAL

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Graf Zahl said:
Microsoft decided to remove DirectDraw from its SDK but ZDoom still references it. End result: You can't compile. Knowing part of this community's resistance to use modern computers removing this functionality is not an option.

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chungy said:

How large is that part of the community? IIRC, myk on these forums still uses Windows 98, but that's all that I can think of at the moment. It may be in the best interest of the ZDoom developers to just weigh how important support for such ancient systems is compared to the burden it puts on development, building, and testing... if it's just one or two, I would certainly call it safe to just let it go and require the Windows version to run on only Windows XP or newer. From what it sounds like, depending on DirectDraw is basically creating a barrier from new potential Windows developers from actually compiling the engine. If DirectDraw support only exists for the favor of Windows 98, I certainly wouldn't shed any tears for Win98.

If Windows 98 support is that important, it may be beneficial for some bold developer to make ZDoom buildable under Cygwin+MinGW with all their associated Windows headers, since they do support DirectDraw (and aren't arbitrarily removing it from the SDK); MinGW also doesn't force a dependency on a DLL that can only work on recent versions of Windows. So, just as an example, you can build Chocolate Doom with MinGW and it'll run perfectly well all the way back to Windows 95 and NT 3.51 (it doesn't need any APIs introduced after those versions).

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chungy said:

If Windows 98 support is that important, it may be beneficial for some bold developer to make ZDoom buildable under Cygwin+MinGW with all their associated Windows headers, since they do support DirectDraw (and aren't arbitrarily removing it from the SDK); MinGW also doesn't force a dependency on a DLL that can only work on recent versions of Windows.

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Graf Zahl said:
ZDoom builds perfectly fine with MinGW, no Cygwin nonsense needed.

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chungy said:

What I said was misleading; I didn't mean to build ZDoom as a Cygwin program specifically, but just to use Cygwin as a build environment (MSYS is quite old and deficient in comparison) for the MinGW version of GCC et al. However you end up building it with MinGW though, it is good news that ZDoom works with it.

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