Re: 7.5 release? - How you can help

[Hans Ronne <hronne at telia dot com>]

>P.S. I guess I'll have to make sure the Web site says
>"approaching" (which I thought it did) rather than "imminent".

Or rather, I should abstain from optimistic forecasts on this list :-).

Other things to do before a release:

1. Fix the recently discussed font problems in the tcltk interface (almost
done).

2. Add several new game modules and update all the existing ones (ditto).

3. Fix the memory problems on Windows. This is the big  one. Several game
modules crash under Windows 98, probably due to the limit on the GDI
resource memory. In fact, after I updated the game modules, adding some
more images to imf.dir, every single game crashes under Windows 98 (this is
one reason why I haven't checked in these updates yet).

I don't think it is acceptable for a release version of Xconq to crash with
100% certainty on what is still one of the biggest installed platforms
worldwide, even if it works fine everywhere else. However, I'm not sure
what to do about it. I guess we could rewrite the imaging code so that it
uses less memory, possibly fix some leaks, but this is quite some work. And
it would probably only fix things until the next game module update adds
even more images.

I would therefore be very interested to hear if there are any known
shortcuts or hacks to deal with the GDI resource problem. It is after all a
well-known limitation in Windows 98 that many programmers must have
stumbled on before.

Any suggestions are welcome.

Hans