On Sun, Dec 21, 2008 at 11:49 AM, Reece Dunn <mscl...@googlemail.com> wrote: > 2008/12/21 Damjan Jovanovic <damjan....@gmail.com>: >> There are some older applications out there, which don't install or >> run correctly unless Wine is emulating the correct Windows version >> (eg. Windows 9x). >> >> At least Windows XP has the ability to use certain heuristics to make >> an educated guess as to which version of Windows the application >> expects, and then lie in GetVersion() and behave like that version in >> relevant APIs. >> >> Should we do something like that for Wine? It would allow many >> applications to work out of the box. > > You can change the version of Windows reported for different > applications, and the default version using winecfg -> Applications.
I know, but bugs coming up from the wrong default version aren't always obvious (in my case they were registry keys that don't get created during installation). > I'm not sure that adding heuristics would be the correct approach, as > those can lead to incorrect results. The winecfg option supports the > user being able to change the version of Windows reported for the > specified application. The workflow could be better, though (e.g. > supporting an option on an exe's right-click menu). Heuristics aren't necessarily wrong: File Header Machine: 014C (i386) Number of Sections: 6 TimeDateStamp: 31104C75 (Thu Feb 1 07:15:33 1996) offset 136 Feb 1 1996 can't be later than Windows 95. > What would be better is to have AppDB keep track of what version of > Windows works best with a particular application. This could then be > queried on install of the application, or downloaded in bulk. It would > be easy to take the data and create a registry file like what winecfg > will be saving to. That way, AppDB becomes the place where this is > maintained (so it is up to the individual maintainers to set the > Windows version if it doesn't work with the default version) and there > are no ugly heuristics involved. The bulk download would only work if you install applications to their default location, but it seems like a good idea. > - Reece > Damjan
