Drugwash

I usually clean up file names right after adding to download list. Strange thing is, when adding a file to download, in eMule's statusbar (bottom-left) any Unicode characters are displayed properly! I tested by adding files with Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean characters in their names mixed with English characters and they were all correctly displayed. Same with the tooltips, although I suspect those are HTML-based (in XP there's a file icon displayed along with the text, which misses in 9x).

Theoretically, this can easily be accomplished by any tool that supports Regular Expressions. For example, Total Commander has a multi-rename feature with RE capabilities.

RetroOS: PPPoE connection creates a systray icon (similar to dial-up since it's broadband dial-up).

Personally I use FastStone Image Viewer too but I have to admit it does take up quite a lot of resources. A simple image viewer that I use either as standalone or (mostly) as a Total Commander plug-in is Chun Sejin's Imagine.

12.FEB.2008-09.FEB.2018, that's what one of the certificates says. So it should be valid another 9 years from now on.

I'll give it a try, just for the sake of it, since I'm happy enough with GOMplayer.

I think sometimes this decision can also be taken by MSLU (unicows.dll), if the application depends on it.

Certain drivers (such as video or sound) require a newer DirectX/IE version in order to install, so it's best to only install chipset (and maybe NIC) drivers first, update DirectX/IE/DCOM and whatever else may be needed and only then install video/sound drivers. There may be other drivers too requiring updated components, so unfortunately there's no fixed frame as to the install order. The best solution I can envision - provided the user already knows about such requirements - would be to allow custom (user-defined) install order of certain components. Since the batch file that basicall does all the AP job seems to be quite fussy about free memory (too many variables or whatever), I've been thinking of a fairly complex AutoHotkey script that could replace it. Unfortunately, I'm caught up with important family issues now and can't pursue the idea but hopefully we could make an attempt sometime soon.

It's not about resources, it's about functions and APIs present or not. A single call to UpdateLayeredWindow is enough for an application not to load in Win9x. And since all recent applications seem to fancy transparency and layered windows, you do the math. There are also a lot of old functions, also available in Win2000+, that have improved counterparts, usually with the Ex suffix, but the latter are only present in Win2000+. They basically do the same thing, with few (often unused or unnecessary) extra items as they usually return a structure. Any call to such functions will fail since they don't exist in win9x libraries hence the runtime errors and/or other crashes. Moreover, there are function pairs that get called differently at runtime. They have a generic name (function_name) which at runtime - depending on operating system version - will automatically expand to call either function_nameA or function_nameW. In certain cases, both A and W versions of a function exist in Win9x, but the W (Unicode-aware) version may be buggy or incomplete, resulting in misbehavior and/or application/system crash. Things are even deeper, one considering different IDE versions that automatically produce executables and libraries dynamically linked to newer runtime libraries that may not be compatible with Win9x (i.e. Visual C 2008 runtime libraries), auto-correction facilities that are not found in older IDEs such as VC6 (open gate to sloppy programming, IMO) and many other issues I won't get into detail now.

Safest way would be to put up a ResHacker script that takes care of the patching automatically and give that script plus ResHacker (if needed) and a readme.txt as a gift.

Sorry, can't focus on this right now - got caught up with some family issues.

Thank you. I wonder why a 4.7GB DVD with a few 1GB files is written as UDF while a similar 4.7GB DVD with many smaller files is written as UDF. Maybe I'm not very focused right now.

Thank you for confirming my findings. I'm not sure where exactly the bug is, but the bug itself is loading the CD driver for a DVD media that is not UDF. I haven't tried removing CDFS.VXD or replacing it with UDF.VXD for testing purposes. Unfortunately, both testing and work on Replatcher (Replacer + Patcher) will have to be delayed, since my father just died and I have a lot of papers to take care of. As soon as settle this up, I'll get back to our business. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Dencorso, thanks for the detailed explanations. Indeed my CDFS.VXD has product version 4.10.2222 and file version 4.10.1999; quite strange numbering scheme, if you ask me, but I recall quite a debate on this issue somewhere around so I'm not gonna dive into it now. Regarding Q256576, I'm afraid the issue may be related but it's definitely not the same, since the Properties panel would show the very same 2.147.450.880 bytes size. However, right now while typing this, I found out something really weird. Inserting a dual-layer DVD trying to reproduce the issue, I had a shock: the unique file contained on this DVD (an ISO image), sized 7.957.301.248 bytes made drive size appear as 7.770.810kB (in Total Commander - I never use Explorer). This DVD was burnt on an XP machine. File system: UDF. After that, I inserted a movie DVD containing 2 folders and (beside other smaller files) four 1.073.709.056 bytes VOB files and the drive size showed 4.287.114 kB in TotCmd. This is an original printed DVD made in Holland. File system: UDF. Then I inserted a DVD containing 2 folders holding a total of 195 avi and MP3 files, all up to over 4.3 GB. Drive size showed 2.097.120 kB. This DVD was burnt on an XP machine. File system: CDFS. And then I inserted another DVD containing 4 folders with lots of files and few subfolders that would sum up to over 4.3 GB. What do you know - drive size: 2.097.120 kB. This DVD was burnt on my Win98SE machine. File system: CDFS. All this leads me to a sole logic conclusion: the CDFS driver is erroneously used when reading DVD media, possibly related to number (and most likely size) of the contained files. The CDFS driver has a drive limit of 2GB. I still have no idea which driver is used for reading the 7GB dual-layer and the printed movie DVDs. As for the patcher... at first I wanted to make it strictly for this task only. While working on it, I realized it would be a waste of time so I decided to try a universal patching approach. However this requires a lot of thinking, failsafe fallbacks, etc so it will take a while before I can come up with a safe version. And it may become a little complicated in the mean time. Here's a preview:

Personally I'm pretty happy with my choice. After all, it's about mind associations as you said yourself. • Control Panel is annoyingly hard to reach at its original place. Having it open as a submenu in the main start menu is piece of cake. • Editors have the sole purpose of editing something; I don't care what exactly, at any point in time - I just know I can find a tool there when I want to edit (modify) an icon, a sound file, an image, a document, a CD/DVD image, etc. • The MS group fits it purpose: keeps me away from those apps until I can't find anything else to replace them. • Multimedia holds codec configurations and players (with their configurations, if separate) • Debug holds the tools I need, since I work with alpha versions of software and need to provide useful crash reports or try to fix things myself • Utilities holds whatever couldn't fit to other categories I strongly dislike sub-categories and even hate applications that create submenus with lots of entries (i.e. Nero tools, VLC). This is sliding way off topic, I'm afraid...

No, the latest I have installed is the October 23, 2008 one as available from MDGx' update on December 1st, 2008 (at the time of the above posting).

Thank you for replying, now things are a lot more clear in regard to the above-mentioned files. I've stumbled into something else though - some of the related files on my system do not quite match: CDFS.VXD 4.10.2222 (QFE) CDTSD.VXD 4.10.1998 CDVSD.VXD 4.90.3004 DISKTSD.VXD 4.90.3001 DISKVSD.VXD 4.10.1998 Do you think this configuration is OK? I'm asking because I generally have no issues with the HDD or CD/DVDs, except for the fact that any DVD I read with my DVD-RW Samsung SH-S182D appears as a 2GB volume (2,097,120 bytes), not a 4.7GB one as it should. All data can safely and correctly be copied from them, though. Do you have any idea who can be responsible for this? The COPY2GB patch, maybe, or any of the above-mentioned files? Anyway, if I can wrap my head around these patches, I may try to create an automated patcher and a restore script (should anything go bad).

Does anyone know of a working (tested) H264 codec for Win9x? I've had X264VfW installed and GOMplayer wouldn't use it for some reason, so I uninstalled it. GOMplayer directed me to download a compatible codec (DirectShow H264 Codec v2.2 from VideoSoft), I installed that one and it crashes the kernel on playback start. The same video file works in VLC 0.8.5 but it lags quite a lot and produces artifacts. I'm not 100% positive on the file's integrity, however it does play in VLC (with their own codec) while it crashes in GOM, so I'd like to find a suitable codec for GOM, if possible. I've had very bad results with ffdshow in the past so I'll keep that in mind only as a last resort. Thank you for any help.

You're welcome, ehb. Regarding your Start menu organisation, I must say I've been doing this for years on my system and also do it for my friends's XP systems (switching to Classic menus, of course) whenever they call me in for help. I do use a few more categories though, as I'm not quite keen on multiple submenus. My categories are as follows: Accessories, Control Panel, Debug, Editors, Games, Internet, Micro$oft, Multimedia, Network, System, Utilities. Besides that, I also have 3 user-defined toolbars containing shortcuts to most used applications (I have 2 monitors in dual-view); I think I may build myself a desktop replacement tool. Until a couple years ago or so, there was no icon on my desktop (Recycle Bin is completely disabled and My Computer is renamed to a blank character ALT+0160 and has a blank icon since it can't be removed from the desktop in Win9x); I'm getting old though and now there's already a clutter of shortcut icons "poisoning" the beautiful drawing of the four stages of life. Apologies for the off-topic - I just got a bit nostalgic about the good ol' times.

Thank you for your work. A couple of small issues though: 1. What are those files responsible for, within the system? Why should one go through all this hassle, is it worth? 2. Is it possible to find another patching system that would not involve so many steps? An AutoHotkey script, maybe, that'd take care of CD files extraction + backup + binary patching of all of the files, at once? 3. Can the patched files be used without 98SE2ME installed or is the latter mandatory (considering we're in its thread)? Well, there's no hurry, it could wait until next year. Happy New Year everybody!

Those of you who have GDI crashes, try to use a resource meter. Personally I've been using FreeRAM XP Pro for years to check resource usage, but there should be other similar tools out there, like ResMon, for example. In my case, when GDI crashes occured, the resources were fairly above 50%, so this rules out the lack of resources. Your mileage may vary, though.

Does any of you have UberSkin installed, particularly a version beyond 8.3.6? I've had such GDI crashes myself, in other non-web applications besides the browser, right after installing/updating 8.3.10 and later. Downgrading to 8.3.6 fixed the issue. However, I keep Flash disabled with TurnFlash, so I can't say it's a Flash issue.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas! Thank you everyone for your generous, unselfish contribution to the general knowledge and for helping improve our daily experience.

MMX is built into CPUs since P I; I have a couple of 200MHz MMX and actually that's been my primary CPU until a couple years ago (on another mobo). I've tried the MMX version of ffdshow at the time, with no luck. Not gonna touch it again. Dunno what I could modify in the BIOS to make video run smoother; I believe everything's just as it should, but if you have any specific settings I should look into, I'll try and post the results. Regarding digital audio, do you mean DTS by chance? If so, an older version of PowerDVD (v4, I think) was able to play DTS correctly in Win9x. It's not freeware though.

Certain topics have attachment option disabled and this one falls into that category, so unfortunately you won't be able to attach files here. Apologies for having mislead you earlier; didn't check the availability of that option until now. You may use third-party free hosting, however, with the drawback of the download being time-limited and usually full of ads.