D2X-XL On Windows 9x/ME

A D2X-XL user from Brazil contacted me about the software these days: He had problems getting it to run on his rather outdated, low end machine (AMD Duron 750 MHz, 128 MB RAM, Geforce MX 440, Windows ME). One problem was that my executable had been produced with Microsoft Visual C .NET 2003, hence requiring additional DLLs (msvcr71.dll) to run. I had switched to .NET because the latest SDL versions referenced Windows API elements that were only accessible with MSVC 6 by installing the Windows platform SDK and a processor pack, while they compiled with .NET without a hitch.

The guy knew something about source ports and coding, so I gave him my old MSVC 6 projects, and he managed to come up with an almost working solution (only problem was an unresolved reference which was easy to fix). The advantage of that executable is that it doesn't need any of the dlls the .NET version needs, so I figured it might work on 16 bit Windows versions and added it to the Windows D2X-XL distribution (d2x-xl-win16.exe). Of course flawless operation on these OS's isn't guaranteed ... but you can try.