On Mon, Dec 22, 2008 at 1:27 AM, Chris Robinson chris.kcat@gmail.com wrote:
On Sunday 21 December 2008 02:46:37 pm Scott Ritchie wrote:
Right, but none of that would be necessary if the heuristic worked in the first place. By having a good heuristic we could at least dramatically cut down on the apps needing this logic.
But how do you tell when an app needs the Windows version changed because it won't work in the default mode, and it's not just hiding a Wine bug? For example, Wine is buggy with some device drivers, which some games will load in XP mode. Set the Windows version to 98 (or Vista, or sometimes even 2k), and they may not, allowing the game to work. In such a case, you don't want to change the Windows version, you want to fix the bug.
The heuristic isn't "app works on this Windows version", it's "app is designed for this Windows version". If a heuristic tells you a game needs 98 when it needs XP, the heuristic is broken, even if the game works better in 98 because it doesn't load a driver.
Also, the existence of driver loading APIs in DLL imports is probably a good heuristic to tell that an app needs XP.
Damjan