[Drugwash]

Took me some time to read the whole topic. Good intentions, I see... if only they wouldn't pave the road to you-know-where.

Remember what happened to the AutoPatcher project - the big one, not soporific's. Reason? "it could've, it' might've..." Don't even think for a split second that they wouldn't take this project down, should they feel threatened in some way.

Now as I'm tired after a blank night, there's only 3 issues to bring up before going to sleep:
1. I can't access the domain at this time; is it supposed to be available already?
2. As 7-zip compression has been mentioned, has anyone thought about adding 7-zip (LZMA, etc) support to Win9x, the way XP has zip built-in? There's a Total Commander plug-in created by Adam Strzelecky; might not be that hard to turn it into a system plug-in.
3. Primary focus should be on a heavy collection of hardware drivers. As long as 99.8% of the currently available hardware does not come with Win9x drivers anymore, there's little point in keeping the OS alive: old hardware dies and OS will die too without new HW driver support.

P.S. Get Miranda IM for realtime communication. Get accounts on any IM network you can, if you don't have them already. Or just get into a Jabber chatroom. I'm mr_drugwash @ jabber.org, just added my Jabber account in Miranda.

Now I'm goin' to sleep. Good luck!

[Fredledingue]

I don't know how the 0.1% of users still on w98 could treathen M$...

[Philco]

Fredledingue, on Jun 22 2008, 05:13 PM, said:

I don't know how the 0.1% of users still on w98 could treathen M$...

0,1%??? 1,4% = over most Linux or Apple MAC!

[Peffse]

Philco, on Jun 23 2008, 04:55 AM, said:

Fredledingue, on Jun 22 2008, 05:13 PM, said:

I don't know how the 0.1% of users still on w98 could treathen M$...

0,1%??? 1,4% = over most Linux or Apple MAC!

Don't know where you took those stats from, but they aren't the same as the ones from w3schools or w3counter or... well, any large OS stat counter that I know of.



Here are the ones from w3school.



Nowhere near 1.4% anymore, much closer to 0.1%, and not over Linux and Mac.

[spplus]

.

This post has been edited by spplus: 20 November 2008 - 03:54 PM

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

spplus, on Jun 23 2008, 05:51 AM, said:

They make expediently so. They are malicious. They want to enforce all for purchase of new system.

Ok I'll agree with you on points 1 and 3 but do you seriously think that MS has a "desire to cause pain, injury, or distress" to you for using an older version of their products? If you do, Im afraid your paranoia level might be getting out of hand.

http://www.merriam-w...onary/malicious

Quote

ma·li·cious
: given to, marked by, or arising from malice

http://www.merriam-w...ctionary/malice

Quote

mal·ice
1 : desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another
2 : intent to commit an unlawful act or cause harm without legal justification or excuse

[Offler]

to geek: remember the windows ME

overbloated, with no real needed features, practically same as previous version...

I have seen XP and worked with them in work and home for some time. i dont see no real benefit in using them instead of using 98SE...


but we are already OT. people here really are not interested how many people are currently using XP or 98SE. the numbers from different networks may vary dramatically.

what i am sure about is that people HERE are interested in further development of OS based on Win9x platform (full dos support, hybrid 24bit kernel, ability to execute Win32 based apps) and if possible to do it legally and in way which may be little bit more professional and user friendly.

[Offler]

well if there is 50 percent of XP users and 50 percent of 9x users but XP users are more active in clicking and reading they may reach higher percentage in acessing maybe it just shows from which OSs are using most webbots

i think that only useable method is to use unique acessing to large portals such as google or yahoo, but still it is hard to distinguish if the user is single or there is a swarm hidden behind router.

but honestly, when walking thorought the city it is hard to find other PC that IBM compatible with XP.

[Fredledingue]

The point I wanted to make was why would M$ go on witch-hunt after w98 users while:
1- w98 userbase is less than or near to one percent and next year it will be half a percent at best.
2- w98 loses market share versus any other M$ OSes.
3- Mac and Linux both eat into M$ market shares at great speed.
4- We do nothing for money

Any action by M$ against the tiny minority of w98 nostalgics will damage their reputation even further. It will cost them money since none of us could pay them a fine that would come even remotely close to their attorney fees and legal expenses. + since most of us are from europe, we could even win an anti-trust case against them at a EU court.

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 23 June 2008 - 01:22 PM

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Drugwash, on Jun 21 2008, 09:25 AM, said:

Took me some time to read the whole topic. Good intentions, I see... if only they wouldn't pave the road to you-know-where.
I can't access the domain at this time; is it supposed to be available already?

The domain is dead because nobody cared about it. I can bring it back up at any time if anyone would bother to do the site. I'll start making tutorials on how to install the various service packs, and once i get a little site done with those tuts i'll up them to that domain.

However, i have other things on my mind at the moment. I'm patching some bugs in an older game to make it run properly under XP and vista. Of course i would love to do work on 98 instead (and i'm almost done patching anyway), but there's one thing you have to realize here: Nobody cares right now. Me and specialbao1 have exchanged a lot of PMs on various matters, and it seems we're really the only ones interested in doing this. In this situation our work would be pretty much useless. I mean of course tutorials would help, but they certainly aren't worth a domain, we could just post them in the forum.

Coz here's how it works. The game i am working on - not very difficult to patch. What's more difficult is learning to solve XP's quirks when applying the actual patch. But anyway, i don't need much assistance on it. Whereas an OS is an immensely complex compilation of programs. Look at it this way - 98 has evolved a lot with all the work done here, but taking it further requires a community effort.

Let's say me and specialbao1 write tutorials and compile the documentation already written here in various places, into one nice clean site. But what if one of the people following our tutorials stumbles upon an undocumented bug? We aren't experienced coders therefore we can't really help. I myself have a few problems with certain programs in my WinMe install, but i don't know whether they have to do with Windows itself, with KernelEx, with UberSkin or with my drivers. There are just too many variables, and that's why i don't ask for help with these issues because i would probably confuse both Xeno86 and Tihiy.

But what if Tihiy and Xeno86 (and not only them) would work together, look at each other's code and fix the mistakes? This has already been done with the merging of UberKern into KernelEx, but we need more than that. We need to work as an organized group.

Even on the game i work on patching, where i do most of the work alone, i still ask around for suggestions on how to do this and that better, i share WIP versions with a fellow moderator on the DigitalZone Board (i am a mod there too), and do a lot of beta testing before releasing the patch to the public. I also contacted the author of a walkthrough for that game and asked him if he could link to my patch when it's done. These are the kind of things we should do here as well.

Fredledingue, i think most people here are concerning themselves too much with what Microsoft thinks about this community. My guess is that they simply don't care, as they're far from losing even the tiniest bit of the market share of their current products - they could even win some more if we get their new software to run on 98.

[Drugwash]

Apologies, it was not my intention to stir the stinky thing. My point was solely to keep it as legal as possible, for two reasons:
- not to harm the forum boards (indirectly)
- to keep the project alive

Remember: if we lose, it's not because they were better but because we made a mistake. So let's not make it.