Availability of old versions

[Xeriphas1994]

Xeriphas1994, at your service.

If someone compiled v2.7.8 (for example) under the current Windows or MacOS, what would be the procedure for including the builds on rephial?

Disagreements about vanilla roadmaps are often rebutted with "just play an old version!" Yes and no. With a newer system AIUI, you have several options and all are really awkward:

• Launch a Windows build under the current Windows and hope it doesn't crash, run illegibly in a corner of the screen, get quarantined as malware, fail to detect your wireless keyboard, ...
• Use DOSBox, losing the windowing and fonts and tilesets and five other popular features I can't remember; a tedious remapping of high-bit characters might also be needed, assuming you even realized something was missing
• Use a Mac emulator, which is indescribably laggy and slow because the rendering was so different from typical Mac software
• Buy period hardware on ebay
• Recompile it yourself (!)

And so forth. To say nothing of the dead variants also recommended on occasion.

Of course this was suggested by my own experiences -- I'll upload the character if you want to laugh at me first -- but actually I'm interested on behalf of newbies and retrogamers, googling the game 30 years from now. They should have a choice, since the vanilla maintainers have had such diverging visions.

I'm not saying I will try this soon, I'm just asking whether I would be wasting anyone's time but my own.

[Pete Mack]

Xeriphias--
Or you can drop in a newer main-win.c file and makefile. I have done this more than once. (The new makefile in particular is *really* easy to use.)

[Xeriphas1994]

Thanks, I'm sure that will help -- but my question is an administrative/logistical question. *If* the builds existed, would the dev team want them?

[Nick]

Um, maybe? They could I guess be included on the relevant page - this one for 2.7.8, for example.