[cw-discuss] Crossover Games?

[Chuck Harris]

Hi Robert,

Robert Shearman wrote:
> Chuck Harris wrote:
>> I wonder if I am the only one that wishes you would stop
>> spending time on games, and put the effort on office type
>> applications?  Perhaps getting IE6 to work under windows 2000?
>>
>> Trying to be everything to everyone only results in disappointment.
>>   
> 
> Chuck,
> 
> I just wanted to clear up one assumption that some people (although not 
> necessarily you) may have made: it isn't the case that the whole company 
> has shifted to working on games all of a sudden. What has actually 
> happened is that we've hired more people (including a full time DirectX 
> developer) to work on games whilst  others continue to work on 
> office-type applications.

That you put more resources on games is exactly what I presumed you had
done.  And that is great, but it does dilute the resources that could be
put on productivity applications.

  For example, I've been working on Office
> 2003/2007 bugs continuously for some time now. Of course CodeWeavers' 
> management and marketing people are spending time preparing for the 
> release, but IMHO it's good for them to do some real work instead of 
> pushing emails around and doodling on pieces of paper ;-)
> 
> I also wanted to address your specific point of wanting IE6 to work in 
> win2000 mode. This works fairly well in CrossOver 6.1/6.2 as a 
> dependency of other applications (it can be used for displaying HTML in 
> applications like Outlook and Quicken)

I did not find that to be true with TaxCut.  When I used the default
Gecko engine, it was able to go off and browse the TaxCut site from
within TaxCut.  But when I changed the default browser to a copy of IE6
that was loaded into a '2000 bottle with TaxCut, the browser did not
apparently launch... the button in TaxCut clicked, but it quickly returned
to the unclicked condition... there was no apparent action.

, but we don't create an icon for
> it. This is because IE6 in win2000 mode doesn't install all the DLLs it 
> requires, because it assumes the OS already has them, which results in 
> some web sites and features not working properly. Since IE6 worked fine 
> in win98 mode, we didn't consider fixing these issues a big priority. 

Microsoft has discontinued all support for windows 98, and as a result, so
have the application developers that use current MS development tools.
Their applications won't install or launch in a '98 bottle.

Most applications these days seem to demand a browser be available before
they will install.  Microsoft development tools, of course, want that
browser to be IE6 or greater.

By your not considering IE6's "issues" to be a big priority, you sadly have
ended up getting caught flat-footed by the market moving forward.

> However, it seems as though there is demand for installing IE6 as an 
> application (rather than a dependency) in win2000 mode for some use 
> cases that we didn't expect, warts and all, so we may have to reconsider 
> decision to not create an icon for it in 7.0 or later versions of 
> CrossOver.

Do you have a list of DLL's IE6 expects to see in a '2000 bottle that are
not usually there?

Do any of them relate to downloading, or sending/receiving messages
through the internet stack from applications programs?

Thanks,

-Chuck Harris