Stuck between a rock (keeping Windows 7 support) and a hard place (adding modern Windows 11 UI support, including dark mode) in mGBA. Maybe I should make it so the 32-bit build has Win7 support and the 64-bit build is the Win11-improved build. But that creates an annoying feature gap, along with the fact that Qt 5.15 and 6.7+ are different enough that bugs might only affect one or the other. Hm...

I was once asked what the last version of mGBA that supported Windows XP was. None. I never supported Windows XP. Fuck XP. It's always been Vista or newer (though I dropped Vista support several years at this point).

By the time I first released mGBA (late 2014), XP was already significantly EOL and Vista had added several nice APIs that I wanted to use, so I decided to just say "stop using XP". As much as I want people to stop using 7 too, 10 is effectively EOL and 11 is just so dogshit that it's impossible to convince anyone still on 7 that it's at all worth it to upgrade to anything anymore. I know I haven't upgraded my desktop from 10 to 11. I just use Linux instead.

"If I'm gonna use something EOL I'm gonna use the one I like better" is a...vaguely sound argument, if you ignore the security implications and the fact that a ton of software has already dropped support for it. (It's only vaguely sound.)

@endrift how separate is the GUI from the emulator raccode? could a QT5 version feasibly be maintained externally?

I'm pretty sure the "Windows 7 market share increases" articles from a few months ago were actually artifacts of AI scraping bots claiming to be random OS/browser combinations and not genuine market share increase.

@charlotte it boils down to what builds I'm distributing. I'm not planning to drop Qt 5 support anytime soon. It's just confusing if I have too many different builds available. I already have enough people asking me which of the four builds they want, when the answer is basically "it doesn't really matter much".

@charlotte (the matrix is 32 vs 64 bit and portable (all in the local dir) vs installer)

@charlotte also since I keep all of the old builds around, adding more builds means more space per rev. It's...significant, actually. Multiple hundred megabytes per commit, I think around 200-300 MB.

@endrift i was thinking along the lines of “drop windows 7 (and qt5 support) and if others cared they could maintain a fork of just the UI”

@endrift the missing secret good option on that list is 8 :D

@endrift @charlotte have you GC'd your working copy lately? It can reclaim some of that space. I keep forgetting to do it myself 😅

@endrift his about making a 32-bit CLI-only that supports 7? How feasible would that be?

@montyontherun No one wants that. The SDL frontend version barely works as is. It's mostly there for embedding into other things but it doesn't even have full input remapping yet. I do want to revamp it but I'm not there yet.

@montyontherun @charlotte This is not my working copy. This is all of the old builds, which are publicly available, as well as other build artifacts, all of which are from CI/CD.

@endrift FWIW, I had used the CLI version of mednafen quite often. It's much faster on my compile - debug workflow.
On MacOS I've switched to mGBA:)

@montyontherun You sound like the type of person who wouldn't still be running Windows 7 even if you hadn't switched to macOS. The intersection of people who'd want to use such a stripped down version of mGBA and are also holdouts on Windows 7 is likely single digits at most, even if the individual categories are three or more digits each.

@endrift @montyontherun imo if you need the space i’d yeet old installers

it’s unlikely that you want to install an old git version as opposed to just running it from a portable folder to test something

@charlotte @montyontherun There have been cases recently where we've wanted those, but mostly due to testing updater issues. The way the updater works varies between them (though the binaries are the same, we still pull different bundles down).

That said, the super old ones are probably safe to pull. I don't need the space, but adding more builds without removing old ones has me start running numbers on size anytime I consider it. In theory if I need cheaper storage I can move from S3 to B2 but it hasn't gotten bad enough that I need to do that yet.

@charlotte @montyontherun a special fuck you to whoever owns dockery.dev for scraping every single build which more than doubled by S3 bill for that month though. Fucker owes me money.

@endrift In my opinion, drop Windows 7. It’s not like users of an outdated OS can’t also use an outdated emulator version, especially if that version remains good enough for most people’s needs.

@endrift (In a gaming context, Valve did it two years ago…)

@asie yeah, Valve dropping Win7 support is probably good enough for me to drop it too