patch 1.04 all save games gone

gnozal · Post by **gnozal** » December 15th, 2007, 1:49 am

BasiliskWrangler wrote:Okay, I just got some confirmation on a few things: the language system I use, in order to remain cross-platform compatible as well as 98/ME compatible does not nor will ever support non-ASCII paths.

Maybe you missed my post but Eschalon doesn't work with Win98SE : http://www.basiliskgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=878 (at least the demo I tried)

YouTube · December 15th, 2007, 3:34 am

Does the latest patch fix this error?

gnozal · Post by **gnozal** » December 15th, 2007, 4:19 am

BasiliskWrangler wrote:Does the latest patch fix this error?

I don't know, I tested the demo [wich already was 1.4 at the time (Sat Dec 08, 2007) iirc].

JOG · Post by **JOG** » December 15th, 2007, 5:01 am

BasiliskWrangler wrote:Does the latest patch fix this error?

If it doesn't it might be worth a try to use SHGetFolderPathW from SHFOLDER.DLL instead, as long as Internet Explorer 4+ is installed, this should work even on Win95.

On Win ME and later a call to shfolder.dll is simply redirected to Shell32.dll.

gnozal · Post by **gnozal** » December 17th, 2007, 2:53 am

gnozal wrote:
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Does the latest patch fix this error?
I don't know, I tested the demo [wich already was 1.4 at the time (Sat Dec 08, 2007) iirc].

Ok, I downloaded the patch, extracted the exe from the installer : the problematic import (SHGetFolderPathW) is still present in 1.04 !

YouTube · December 17th, 2007, 3:11 am

JOG wrote:
BasiliskWrangler wrote:Does the latest patch fix this error?
If it doesn't it might be worth a try to use SHGetFolderPathW from SHFOLDER.DLL instead, as long as Internet Explorer 4+ is installed, this should work even on Win95.

Well, the game requires at least DirectX 7.0, which I am not sure you can get on Win95. Also, according to Blitz, the code is not Win95 compilable. I was just going off their documentation that the code was 98/ME compatible.

Furthermore, with no in-house way of testing on 98, it may be easier to just remove that and ME from the list of compatible OSs. I could implement gnozal's fix, but again, I have no way of testing for on-going compatibility. Honestly, if his hack works, that is good enough for me and hopefully the very few number of people who still have 98 and the hardware needed to run the game smoothly.

JOG · Post by **JOG** » December 17th, 2007, 7:00 am

BasiliskWrangler wrote:Furthermore, with no in-house way of testing on 98, it may be easier to just remove that and ME from the list of compatible OSs.

No need to remove ME, it was the first OS with Shell32.dll v5.0 that includes the Shfolder functions. But wouldn't it be a pity to exclude Win98 users just because of a fix for another issue that excluded some other users?

Gnozal 's fix just makes sure that an existing function is imported when Windows initializes the game. I guess you use SHGetFolderPathW only to get Eschalon's install folder for the non-latin-"My document"-folder workaround. So the patch works simply because that function is never called on Gnozal's PC...

If you actually link to the dll-functions in blitz basic yourself, then you should use SHFolder.dll instead of Shell32.dll for Win9x compatibility (see remarks under http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb762181.aspx)

Otherwise yes, release a win-98 compatibility patch that removes the import of Shell32.SHGetFolderPathW.