Quote:
Originally Posted by hyc
The hard drive in my last Win98 machine died a couple months ago, and I don't feel like installing it again. Certainly it's not worth putting a new IDE drive in such an old machine, or trying to find media to install from, or a license key... So unless someone else feels like investigating, that's that. How anyone can manage to run a 12 year old Windows OS on the internet today is amazing in itself, given the number of viruses that would descend on the box within seconds of it going online.
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That's quite all right, I was only making a note for the convenience of other users running Win9x as to what's the latest version which will run on this O/S.
This is simply a standard service that Win98 users provide for each other.
The O/S is more popular than perhaps your message implies. It runs extremely fast on a modern processor (at least twice as fast as Vista!). And because NT software can't run on it, it's quite immune to viruses designed for WinXP. There are, of course, such things as Windows 98 firewalls, too.
I at least am very grateful for the fact that all versions up to 2.1d already run on Win98.
Win98SE is increasing its user-base again, since the release of a Microsoft program called Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 which enables Win9x to be run in a virtual machine. (But beware of "Windows Virtual PC" in Windows 7, which is not the same thing at all!)
All I can say is, if anyone on the rtmpdump development team is running Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (a free download from Microsoft) and cares to do so, it's possible to test RTMPDUMP on Win98 on an XP/Vista system. I don't think there are any FAT32 / NTFS compatibility issues in doing so.
Win98 uses an MS development called Microsoft Layer for Unicode (a dll file called UNICOWS.DLL) which provides unicode support in Win98. It just requires the dll to be in the same folder as rtmpdump.exe in order to work. RTMPDUMP v2.1d doesn't require it. But it could be relied on, like any other system file, by any current build of rtmpdump, and would make the program execute in Win98 without the hassle of removing any unicode.
I'm told that the MSLU loader has a very simple method for loading unicows.dll: it makes a single call to LoadLibraryA. It does so without any path, so that if you happen to load it first in your code the loader will pick up the one selected. As I say, this dll is presumed to be always in the rtmpdump folder.
I realise there are other issues to consider, but unicode support at least need not be one of them.
No offense intended. I just wanted to point out that, due to these recent developments, Win98 support is not quite completely impossible.