[Coco] DriveWire 4 on Window 98

[Frank Swygert]

Just make sure this info gets into the documentation, preferably at the beginning -- maybe in a "System Requirements" list or paragraph.

================================

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 01:10:59 -0400
From: Aaron Wolfe<aawolfe at gmail.com>


After investigating things, it seems there are 2 problems running DW4 on Win98.

The first is the JVM version required.  This I have solved, and DW4
now requires only version 1.5.  This will allow it to run on even
older Linux and Mac machines, and allows the server and "lite" UI to
run fine on Win 98 (the lite UI allows disks to be inserted/removed
and little else, similar to the DW3 software).

However, to run the full featured UI there is also a problem with the
native GUI library (SWT).  They dropped support for Win98 quite some
time ago.

In order to make the full DW4 UI run on Win98, I would have to use a
very old version of SWT, which would potentially impact the more
modern platforms negatively and limit the features we can use going
forward.

Given that Win98 is ~15 years old and unsupported by basically
everything these days, I think we will have to follow suit and support
only XP and above.  Note that even though Microsoft is dropping XP
support early next year, there should be no problem supporting XP with
DW4 for quite a long time, if ever.

You can still run the server on a Win98 machine and use either the
lite UI, the OS9 interface, the DW4Man program by Bill, or run the
standard GUI on another more modern computer to control it.

-- 
Frank Swygert
Editor - American Motors Cars Magazine
www.amc-mag.com