Forum:Please port to older Windows versions
Hi, could someone please port the newly released vanilla NetHack 3.6.0 to older Windows versions such as Windows XP, and have it also work on older CPUs (my CPU is an AMD Sempron 2800+ which doesn't support the SSE2 instruction set)? If you use the GNU GCC compiler for Windows (I recommend MinGW instead of Cygwin, and in particular recommend the MinGW distribution called TDM-GCC and suggest the 32-bit version), well that will produce executables that work as far back as Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0 on CPUs as far back as the 386, while still being perfectly compatible with the newest 64-bit Windows 10. The best IDE for C/C++ on either Windows or Linux (not Mac OS X though sorry) is Code::Blocks and its Windows version integrates very well with TDM-GCC. In fact Code::Blocks provides builds that have TDM-GCC bundled with it (if you use an older version of Code::Blocks with a newer version of TDM-GCC you'll have problems). Right now other than the nightly builds there is also a release candidate out right now for the latest Code::Blocks which should work fine with the latest TDM-GCC (the last stable Code::Blocks from 2013 obviously doesn't work with the latest TDM-GCC from 2015). I'd suggest the latest Code::Blocks 15.12 Release Candidate 1 (WITHOUT bundled MinGW) as the IDE, used with the latest TDM-GCC 32-bit bundle 5.1.0-3 distribution of MinGW-GCC as the compiler. That oughta be able to compile NetHack 3.6.0 or anything else written in C or C++, even stuff using the latest language features like C11 or C++14, and compile it so it works even on really old computers.
Anyway someone please compile and build a NetHack 3.6.0 port for older 32-bit Windows versions, for people who aren't using Windows 7 yet. With the above instructions you ought to be able to build NetHack 3.6.0 to run on any Windows version as far back as Windows 98 (maybe even 95?) or Windows NT 4.0 on any CPU as far back as a 386. That'll be fine not just for me with my early-2005 32-bit AMD CPU running Windows XP, but people on computers from back in the 1990s still running Windows 9x if there are still any of those around (I've seen stuff online from Windows 98 enthusiasts who apparently still exist and still use Windows 98 even today in 2015, so if you think I am out of date using Windows XP just think about the Windows 98 enthusiast community, or for that matter, the people who still use DOS).
Porting NetHack to all sorts of platforms has always been a big part of its history so not even having a version that works on 32-bit Windows XP is kinda ridiculous. Anyway I think it's likely plenty of NetHack developers or developers of various NetHack variants might read this and have the programming skills to pull it off (there might be some compiler warnings and/or errors and only folks like you who know the NetHack code inside and out would have an easy time of getting things to work). I'm more of a C++ developer than a vanilla C developer and I have a tough time with memory management in vanilla C plus I don't know the NetHack source code and it takes awhile to get up to speed on a project so I figured someone else might be better suited to getting this compiled correctly than me. Anyway thanks for reading this everyone, I hope one of ya manages to port this to older versions of 32-bit Windows. Oh, and for the people who program variants... it'd also be nice if you compiled your variants to work on older versions of Windows and work with older CPUs, and didn't use Microsoft's compilers, instead using the trusty MinGW-GCC compilers, specifically the handy TDM-GCC distribution which is all-in-one and works quite well.
Oh and hopefully NetHack 3.6.0 doesn't use any APIs that require Windows 7 or later or Vista or later such as DirectX 11. If so that would make things tougher as the last version of DirectX supported by Windows XP (as well as Windows 98, ME, and 2000) is DirectX 9.0c. That's just one example of a new API in the Windows NT 6.x kernel that might possibly be used in NetHack 3.6.0 and prevent it from being compatible with Windows XP or even older versions. Hopefully NetHack 3.6.0 uses as few new APIs as possible... it's still written in vanilla C, I think, and it's written to be cross-platform, so I don't expect they would use too many new APIs from Windows.
