Wine as a testing tool for Win32 development

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Progman
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Joined: Wed Oct 02, 2019 7:48 am

Wine as a testing tool for Win32 development

Post by Progman »

Hi!

This is NOT a complaint, more a congratulations.

I've been writing an application for Windows, using the mingw compiler to produce the actual code, and Wine to test the executable, since I am a linux user and don't use Windows on my workstation.

This works incredibly well, in fact you might say Wine works TOO well.

I had converted some PNG files to BMP using Imagemagick, so I could include them in my resource script and subsequently load them during execution using the Win32 LoadBitamp (applies to LoadImage too) win32 API.

This worked perfectly when testing with Wine, but for some reason, would fail under Windows XP (tested using a VM), Windows 8, and Windows 10.

Oddly enough, I discovered (by opening the executable with MS Visual Studio and exploring its resources) that Windows seemingly cannot load bitmaps that are in BMP format greater than version 3.x !

Visual Studio was able to list the bitmaps in the Bitmaps section of the executable's resources, Visual Studio was unable to edit them, even though the bitmaps were perfectly valid.

Long story short, I converted the bitmaps (again using Imagemagick) from v 4.0 to v 3.x format and then every version of Windows was able to load them, and of course Wine could too.

I guess what I wanted to say was Wine is a better-than-Windows Windows!

Cheers, and thank you to the development team for your continued hard work and excellence for all these years, I've been a fan since the 90s

Thanks again
winspool
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Posts: 19
Joined: Fri Feb 22, 2008 3:39 pm

Re: Wine as a testing tool for Win32 development

Post by winspool »

Welcome.
I also use wine regulary for checking cross-compiled programs
with tcc (Tiny C Compiler) or other compiler
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