Compiling Qt for Windows 98

Question

I need to support Windows 98. The Qt documentation claims this is possible, but there are no instructions. The distributed binaries of Qt 4.6 don\'t run on Win98 and the majorit

Answer 1

Here is as far as I'm going to get on this:

You can target Windows 98 using MinGW or VC++ 6 SP5 from any Windows version. Cross-compiling from Linux is doable but not easy to set up.

Qt 4.4.3 was the last version officially tested on Win98. To run the distributed binaries on Win98, you need to install older versions of glu32.dll and opengl32.dll that are available from Microsoft. Due to an unresolved bug, Assistant will launch but can't load the help files. The alternate version in the bin directory, assistant_adp.exe, works fine. It seems the only other potential problem is that QtOpenGL may use features not available on older boxes.

Qt 4.5.3 appears to be still compatible except for WebKit, OpenGL, and Phonon. QtOpenGL expects OpenGL 1.5, which I don't know is even possible on older boxes. I didn't look into Phonon deeply enough to see exactly what the problems are. QtWebKit now requires Win2K or better. The distributed binaries work mostly OK. Assistant depends on QtWebKit, so will not launch, but assistant_adp.exe still works.

Qt 4.6.3 distributed binaries are now completely incompatible with Win98. It may be possible to get some things working with MinGW 4.4 and a lot of hacking.

Building Qt Creator requires Qt 4.6.0 and either MinGW 4.4 or VS 2008.