[freesci-develop] Win32 platform potential changes

[Alex Angas]

Hi all,

There are a few potential changes regarding the Win32 platform, some of
which have been previously discussed, that I wanted to get some feedback on
from the mailing list. These affect developers and users. Please let me know
if you have any thoughts on the below:

1. Unless someone else wants to maintain the Visual Studio 2003 project
files, I intend for FreeSCI 0.6.4 to be the last release with support for
Windows 95. The Win32 port will continue to support Windows
98/2000/XP/2003/Vista. If no-one volunteers to maintain them, the Visual
Studio 2003 project files will eventually be removed from the source tree,
meaning that Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista will be required to build FreeSCI
using the free (or otherwise) Visual C++ 2005/2008.

2. The DirectX 8 SDK is no longer available for download from Microsoft and
is becoming increasingly hard to find. I would like to update this to the
DirectX 9 SDK. The main reason is that there is a lot more documentation
available for the newer version, making it easier to develop for. It will
also remain current for some time and more smoothly integrates into recent
versions of Visual C++. The downsides are that it will break Win32 build
environments requiring developers to have the newer SDK installed to build
successfully, and is not supported by Windows 95 (which shouldn't be an
issue, see previous paragraph).

3. I've noticed on Vista that FreeSCI does not put its config folder into
the location specified by Microsoft for applications (under AppData). This
is very apparent and looks unusual from a user's perspective in Explorer. I
would like to correct this for Vista at least, and preferably for all other
Win32 environments to keep them consistent. This would require user
education and if the folder is found in the incorrect location, that it be
moved and the user notified.

Thanks for your time!

Alex.