PuTTY wish port-win32s

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summary: Port to Win32s
class: wish: This is a request for an enhancement.
difficulty: taxing: Needs external things we don't have (standards, users etc)
priority: dormant: This is an old feature request that we no longer think is relevant.

It shouldn't in principle be too difficult to arrange that PuTTY can be built for Win32s (an extension to Windows 3.1 to let you run 32-bit programs).

The last vaguely useful Win32s build I know of is from 1999 Nov 4, and even then the configuration dialog didn't work. The most recent attempt (2001 May 17) had a working config dialog, but crashed on starting a session, and as such doesn't really represent progress.

Compiler/linker support is required for a Win32s build. At the least, the binary must have a .reloc section (symptom of its not doing so is "Invalid format"). MSVC 4 (4.1 or earlier, not 4.2 or later) can build for Win32s with /fixed:no, and mingw32 appears to be able to build with vile dlltool hacks, although I don't think there's suitable startup code.

Increasing use of Windows' Unicode functions may spell doom for a Win32s port. Not sure.

Help here would be most welcome.

SGT, 2024-11-17: classifying this wish as very dormant indeed. We're still just about keeping a version of PuTTY runnable on Win95, but that's the earliest we go. Win32s is even older than that, and we're not going further into the past!

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Audit trail for this wish.

(last revision of this bug record was at 2024-11-17 14:53:03 +0000)