Is it not possible to run compiled C++ applications in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0?

Question

Whenever I use MinGW to compile C++ applications, they work correctly in modern versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

However, when I attempt to run them on Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, I get these errors:

Does that mean that the idea of running compiled C++ applications is fundamentally unsupported in those versions?

Note: I haven't tested Windows 98 and Windows ME yet.

Edit: I've tested Windows 98. The testsortingvisualization runs properly, but the tetrisimplementation displays a blank command prompt and doesn't halt. Both of these programs gave the exact same error given above in Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0. Keep in mind, Windows 2000 can run both correctly.

Edit: Microsoft claims some of the functions I used (WriteConsoleOutput, GetAsyncKeyState) have a minimal requirement of Windows 2000. Indeed, it's tested not to work in Windows 98. I haven't figured out a more compatible way to do console output (system 8-bit codepage, 80 columns, 25 rows, 16 colors) or key detection.

The MSVCRT.DLL failure: the DLL is a critical dependency for compiled C++ applications, so it's fundamentally not possible to run any compiled C++ applications on Windows 95 at all.

I haven't found an explanation for the NT 4.0 issue.

Answer 1

The MS Visual C++ runtime DLL was not distributed with early versions of Windows, you either statically linked the code to the Microsoft libraries (not possible with MinGW), or you deploy the dependencies with your application.

The redistributable parts of VC++ (in which MSVCRT.DLL is included) are provided in a redistributable package specific to various versions of VC++, MSCVRT.DLL is from VC++ 6.0, and no longer available from from official sources; at your own risk you can get it from here for example.

Your Windows NT 4.0 error is a matter of your code using an API that was not part of the Win32 API when NT 4 was current. You can specify the target Windows version through various macros to restrict the API available to your code. That will then generate a compile time error rather then a runtime error. If that particular call is critical to your application, then it simply cannot be run on WinNT. The documentation for SetCriticalSectionSpinCount() states that the minimum supported system is XP.

With respect to your console I/O issue, MSVCRT.DLL includes Microsoft's conio library (not the same or as extensive as Borland's). MinGW includes conio.h header I think or here. That may provide what you need.

Answer 2

Perhaps you can statically link to the required libraries?

Answer 3

I could write novel here on the actual set of issues, but the bottom line is this:

Newer C/C++ runtime libraries, whether linked statically or dynamically into the target EXE, depend on OS APIs that were not available in Windows 9x. You'll need a set of tools that are still compatible with these a̶n̶c̶i̶e̶n̶t legacy versions of Windows.

You are going to need Visual Studio 2005 or earlier if you want to target Windows 95 and NT 4. As per the Wikipedia page:

Visual Studio 2005, codenamed Whidbey ... was released online in October 2005 ... ... It is the last version available for Windows 2000 and also the last version to be able to target Windows 98, Windows Me and Windows NT 4.0 for C++ applications.

You might be able to do some hybrid thing with MinGW - let it still be the compiler, but link with the older MSVC*.lib files from Visual Studio 2005.

Answer 4

When compiling, the compiler doesn't seem to find the correct definitions for a specific Windows version or a specific Internet Explorer version. Why is that? You need to set defines _WIN32_WINDOWS, _WIN32_WINNT, WINVER and/or _WIN32_IE to the minimum platform you plan to support before including the windows.h header file. Possible values for these definitions can be found in the header w32api.h file.

Taken from here