Bug 2131 - 16-bit support?

Shachar Shemesh wine-devel at shemesh.biz
Sun May 8 08:58:43 CDT 2005


Andreas Mohr wrote:

>Hi,
>
>On Sat, May 07, 2005 at 08:09:39PM -0500, Dustin Navea wrote:
>  
>
>>I was wondering, since I have been away for so long, are we still 
>>implementing functionality for 16-bit programs?  The reason I ask is 
>>because the freecell and solitaire from Win98/ME will not load in wine, 
>>while the ones from 2k/XP will.  This is obviously due to the fact that 
>>our cards.dll is 32-bit only, whereas the cards.dll in Win98/ME is 16-bit.
>>
>>Of course, the Win98/ME versions of the games wont start on WinXP either 
>>for the same reason.
>>    
>>
>As has been mentioned before on WD, cards.dll is a very obvious Microsoft
>screwup, since both 16bit and 32bit DLL carry the same name, which is a big no-no.
>I really don't think we want to patch our loader like mad to accomodate for such
>a stupid mistake.
>  
>
And I, personally, will not see the lose of the 16 bit version as too 
much of a problem. However:

>Instead, maybe we should implement cards16.dll and cards.dll.
>Then maybe there would be the possibility to programmatically advise the user
>to move the cards16.dll .so to the cards.dll .so in case he requires the 16bit
>version?
>  
>
A real PE file has an NE header, which has a MZ header. Usually, these 
headers just tell whoever is trying to run the application that this is 
a 32 bit application. One can, however, generate a DLL which is both a 
32 and a 16 bit DLL.

Does our loader support such a format? If we call LoadLibrary16 on a DLL 
that has both PE and NE, will it use the NE? If so, we can create both 
DLLs inside the same file, and problem solved.

>OTOH, is cards.dll being used by any program other than Microsoft's Solitaire?
>If it isn't, then it's rather useless to care about the 16/32bit distinction
>anyway.
>  
>
I'm with you on this one, but if the Windows loader can do the 16/32 
separation and we can't we may need to fix that.

>I think I wouldn't feel too uncomfortable with providing the 32bit cards.dll
>only, even though this is a less preferrable situation.
>  
>
I'm with you.

>Andreas
>  
>
       Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
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