Wine 9.8 Fixes Nearly 20 Year Old Bug For Installing Microsoft Office 97

[Weasel]

What I tell people is to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, in other words run Windows software on Windows and Linux software on Linux.

Uh no.

Because Wine works.

I don't use Office 97. Why the fuck should I care it didn't work until now?

[oiaohm]

Alright fine, 365 dropped quite a lot of support, but what about all the other office alternatives, including LO? Also, I don't see where in that link it mentions what has been dropped from Office 97

It what Office 97 supports.

Import of DOS/Windows legacy word processing documents: Microsoft Word for DOS, Microsoft WinWord 5, Microsoft Word 6.0 / 95

Office 97 has all the filters for these and more. Microsoft starts removing import filters at Office 2000 yes year 2000.

All the office alternatives if you remove Libreoffice/Openoffice they all don't have legacy file format support.

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/advice-and-guidance/managing-your-collection/preserving-digital-collections/digital-preservation-workflows/4-access/

Most national archives around the world the only office suites you use are Libreoffice and OpenOffice.

Remember how you said about Libreoffice/Openoffice stuffing up document formatting. Those errors have to be checked for.

I get you don't want to agree with me but you don't have to play stupid. Just install XP, or, a different legacy version of Windows in a VM. Virtualbox is plenty fast and easy to set up.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/installing-office-97-under-windows-xp-pro-sp3/07fce01c-9d0f-4f79-af87-3ab11635adf2

Turns out Office 97 and the older Office suites like Office 95 are not happy on anything NT based. This is the appears to work problem but they have in fact been incorrectly installed and they progressively go wrong.

If they care that much about format preservation of an 20+ year old document, do you really think it's out of the question for them to run Windows in a VM (even a trial version) just to view it?

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=88284

How much time are you going to spend debugging a Windows 9X OS to make it work todo this. Your 9x versions of windows with Modern CPUs don't straight up work in virtual machines.

PDF printers for Windows 98 are rare

Should have been more clear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

PDF is not just a PDF. Dealing with archives you are dealing in PDF/A that goes from rare to non existent for Windows 98.

you seem to suggest that such government agencies would retain Office 97 yet not use a legacy version of Windows to go with it. Governments put in quite a lot of effort to retain compatibility with old tech.

They do but they are not stupid there is a cost calculation going on here. Last 4 years it come more and more problem to run 9x Windows in a VM. There comes a point where they see the writing on the wall. 9x is just coming more and more trouble to keep working. This kind of explains the work on wine in recent years to make Office 97 work. Yes government funds to developers has turned up to fix this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfEzjcG_0gs

8-inch floppies and drives are one over built device. Surprise they use the same signals as your 5 1/4 and 3 1/4 drives. I know this because when I was at high school we had a really IBM XT with 8 inch floppy drive box. Yes box that sat next to computer.that connected by a D-shell connector with it own wall power connector and yes you could plug a 5 1/4 or a 3 1/4 drive in there as well..

USA government stopping using 8-inch floppies line up with Linux kernel starting to plan to remove floppy drive support.

https://techreport.com/news/linux-dropping-floppy-drive-support/

Yes USA government stopped using floppies in general at the same time because the Linux driver for them was going away because the cost to keep on supporting them was about to go up massively..

We are seeing the same thing here here Windows 9x at archives being used in virtual machines. Windows 9x is simple coming too problematic simpler to fund the little bits of broken in wine to be fixed. There is only a limited number of bits of legacy software they are firing those virtual machines up for anyhow. Big one MS Office 97.

Its not like the person working in archives would be using the vm every day. Its only when a document does not open correctly in Libreoffice/Openoffice and the document is critical enough. Yes VM can have been deleted due to lack of use. Remember those working in archives is paid a decent amount so spending hours messing around with a Windows 9x vm just to run Office 97 to confirm a document is right or wrong works out as more cost than paying developers to fix the wine issues and use modern Linux instead.

Fixing Office 97 bugs in wine at the moment make perfect sense with the Windows 9x failing in virtual machines. While windows 9x worked in vms there was not the critical need to fix wine.

[kylew77]

Why not? Office 97 is still perfectly usable; if you own the software and it still works, why not use it?

I used to say the same about Office XP, it was the one I used in High School and college. Up till 2016, but then I discovered Google docs and its excellent Grammer and spell checker that far exceed what Office XP offered. I now no longer look back at Office XP when Goggle Docs can do so much better.

[kylew77]

Better yet, just use Windows 98 SE if you care that much about preserving such functionality. It's not like the OS is demanding of system resources by today's standards; the average modern Wifi router is practically a supercomputer compared to what the OS was intended to run on. Of course, now that this bug is fixed, Installing 98 SE isn't necessary, but I'm speaking in terms of hindsight, before this bug was patched.
.

Have you tried running Windows 98 on a modern computer? Last time I did this the best AMD had to offer was an FX Bulldozer, pre Zen architecture. I could kind of get Windows XP to run on a Phenom II series motherboard because those had floppy drive connectors and often times still IDE connectors and more importantly floppy drivers for SATA ports. That same Phenom II wouldn't run Windows 98 at all, I know because I tried. One of the last systems I got to run Windows 98 was displaying the graphics in grey scale only, no color. I can't imagine how hard it is to get XP or 9x running on a Zen 4!

[oiaohm]

Have you tried running Windows 98 on a modern computer? Last time I did this the best AMD had to offer was an FX Bulldozer, pre Zen architecture. I could kind of get Windows XP to run on a Phenom II series motherboard because those had floppy drive connectors and often times still IDE connectors and more importantly floppy drivers for SATA ports. That same Phenom II wouldn't run Windows 98 at all, I know because I tried. One of the last systems I got to run Windows 98 was displaying the graphics in grey scale only, no color. I can't imagine how hard it is to get XP or 9x running on a Zen 4!

And CPU incompatibility issues even appear when using VMs for XP and 9x. Office 97 does not work right under anything NT based. Yes even NT 4.0 from the same time frame as Office 97.

Between OS not liking newer CPU and MS Office 97 not liking newer Windows OS this kind of leaves you in a rock and hard place. Wine security implementation is closer to that of 9x than NT so software like MS Office 97 likes Wine more than current day Windows.

[QwertyChouskie]

Sure. If you don't mind the UI/UX from 1997, and you don't mind not being able to use the new xml format files(docx, xlsx, etc...). With the features of office 97, you might as well use a modern version of libre office. Oh, and it has reasonable support for modern MS Office files, that will work unless you are using advanced formatting.

I don't use Office 97 myself, but my Dad does. He also has LibreOffice so he can view docx/xslx files sent to him, but for his own documents, why settle for a slower application with maybe 95% compatibility and you don't know as well where all the buttons are, when you could use a faster application with 100% compatibility and you know where everything is with like 30 years of experience?

[QwertyChouskie]

Did you bother to think of the answer to your own question? There are objectively better free alternatives nowadays, and there's more than just simply Libre/OpenOffice. You may argue what oiaohm would say, in which case:

See above post.

[holunder]

Please name the successor of Wine 9.8 Wine 9.8 SE!

[mrg666]

With Wine and Proton available, I almost never use Windows anymore and it is such a bliss. Old Office 97 is such an irrelevant software apparently for most people that it took so long to fix it. Thank you, Wine developers!

[pinguinpc]

With this wine version winehq begin provide noble official packages:

https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/noble/main/binary-i386/

https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu/dists/noble/main/binary-amd64/

back to improvements them add many commits related to wmv

Rémi Bernon:

mfreadwrite/tests: Do not accept MFVideoFormat_RGB32 in the test transform.

mfreadwrite/tests: Avoid using MFCreateMediaBufferFromMediaType.

mfreadwrite/tests: Shutdown the test stream event queues on source shutdown.

mfreadwrite/reader: Avoid leaking the stream transform service MFT.

winegstreamer: Set other aperture attributes on video media types.

winegstreamer: Always set aperture attributes on video decoder output types.

winegstreamer: Introduce a new wg_transform_create_quartz helper.

winegstreamer: Use DMO_MEDIA_TYPE in the WMV decoder.

mf/tests: Use a separate field for buffer_desc image size and compare rect.

evr/tests: Sync compare_rgb32 / dump_rgb32 helpers with mf tests.

mfmediaengine/tests: Sync compare_rgb32 / dump_rgb32 helpers with mf tests.

winegstreamer/video_processor: Allow clearing input / output types.

mf/tests: Move the video processor input bitmap names to the test list.

mf/tests: Add more video processor tests with aperture changes.

mf/session: Introduce new (allocate|release)_output_samples helpers.

mf/session: Get session topo_node from their IMFTopologyNode directly.

mf/session: Introduce new session_get_topo_node_output helper.

mf/session: Introduce new session_get_topo_node_input helper.

mf/session: Wrap samples in IMFMediaEvent list instead of IMFSample list.

mf/session: Handle transform format changes and update downstream media types.


Ziqing Hui:

winegstreamer: Merge video_cinepak into video field.

winegstreamer: Merge video_h264 into video field.

winegstreamer: Merge video_wmv into video field.

winegstreamer: Merge video_indeo into video field.

winegstreamer: Merge video_mpeg1 into video field.

winegstreamer: Implement mf_media_type_to_wg_format_video_wmv.

winegstreamer/video_decoder: Set input/output infos in h264_decoder_create.

winegstreamer/video_decoder: Change decoder attributes.

winegstreamer/video_decoder: Add wg_transform_attrs member.

winegstreamer/video_decoder: Support aggregation.

winegstreamer/video_decoder: Use video_decoder to implement wmv decoder.

but in practice stay testing various games with wmv cinematics but dont appear changes in my case until now


almost forget on non directly related with wine, i ask about this for dxvk

https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/pull/3411

because show all tasks are completed and devs put this in this topic:

There is a goal of having it merged for the dxvk 2.4 release. Just needs to be reviewed beforehand.