[Bug 58198] New: Wine missing WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK, required by VB SendKeys

[WineHQ Bugzilla]

http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=58198

Bug ID: 58198
           Summary: Wine missing WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK, required by VB
                    SendKeys
           Product: Wine
           Version: 8.0
          Hardware: x86
                OS: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: user16
          Assignee: [e-mail]
          Reporter: [e-mail]
      Distribution: ---

Wine doesn’t implement WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK, which is required by the Visual
Basic SendKeys function. This makes the game “Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol”
unplayable after entering the dungeon.

I’ve confirmed with 32-bit Wine 8 and 16-bit VB3, but the logic seems unchanged
in more recent Wine (and VB) versions. Microsoft eventually released a VB6
runtime that reimplemented SendKeys using SendInput instead of
WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK, but that only fixes VB6 binaries.

https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2007/09/10/4850360.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20130615064311/http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/a...

The story gets worse for programs that invoke DoEvents after SendKeys. Since
DoEvents “first clears all pending keystrokes from the SendKeys function,” it
enters an endless loop waiting for PeekMessage to return the expected
WH_JOURNALPLAYBACK messages. CPU usage goes to 100%, and it’s easy to run out
of stack space if DoEvents is invoked repeatedly.

https://nolongerset.com/how-doevents-works/

Thankfully, running with WINEDEBUG=warn emits a clear message,
“SetWindowsHookEx16 hook type 1 broken in Win16” pointing us to
https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/blob/master/dlls/user.exe16/hook.c

This game is particularly creative, using SendKeys as some sort of input
filter. Many keyboard and mouse inputs are apparently translated to SendKeys
calls. I don’t fully understand the logic, except that the game is unplayable
without it.

I can’t say whether it’s worth fixing this or not. At the very least, it’s
helpful to know why this game doesn’t work, without having to keep trying each
new Wine release.

The free demo of “Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol” can be downloaded from
https://www.decklinsdemise.com/mordor.htm