Reporting a successful compilation with MinGW UCRT64 toolchain

[clbianco]

Dear All,

In the instructions for DOSBox-X MinGW compilation (i.e. BUILD.md), it is indicated to use the MinGW64 toolchain. Needless to say, it works very well. However, I saw that the MinGW64 toolchain is currently being deprecated in favour of the UCRT64 toolchain. The main difference is that MinGW64 toolchain links with the old msvcrt.dll, while UCRT64 links with the new Universal C RunTime (the same library used also by Visual Studio 2015 and beyond).

More info on the two different toolchains at: https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/ and at https://www.msys2.org/news/#2022-10-29-changing-the-default-environment-from-mingw64-to-ucrt64.

Therefore, I tried to build latest 2025-01-01 DOSBox-X release with the UCRT64 toolchain, and I am happy to report that it works perfectly (and, of course, it imports from the UCRT dlls and not from msvcrt.dll anymore). I am currently testing the resulting binary, but I do not see any noticeable difference with the legacy MinGW64 build.

Best,
Carlo Luciano

[joncampbell123]

I remember finding out back in 2016 that the original MinGW, the one that can only target 32-bit, was still capable of compiling for MSVCRT.DLL as far back as Windows 95 :)

Very modern C++ on Windows 95, how about that? 👍

[Torinde]

From what I read Visual Studio 2015 is the last to supports XP, so for 64-bit it's just right.

For 32-bit currently 95/NT4 are supported by lowend9x, but it would be good if that can go even lower:

• Guide for compiling SVN for NT3.5x
• potentially down to Win32s/Win3.1x, compiled for 386 and with minimum required video lowered to VGA
• for HX DOS the minimum required sound lowered to SB2.0

[clbianco]

I remember finding out back in 2016 that the original MinGW, the one that can only target 32-bit, was still capable of compiling for MSVCRT.DLL as far back as Windows 95 :)

Yes, I remember very well the original MinGW toolchain, I played quite a lot with it in the early 2000s... ;) If I remember correctly, it was able to compile even for the original CRTDLL.DLL, i.e. for WinNT3.5x and for Win32s/Win3.1x... ;) Sadly, I have no first hand experience on this, when I played with it we were already in the NT5.x (i.e. Win2000/XP) era...

[maron2000]

I put a PR to build nightly builds based on UCRT64 so that people can try it.

[clbianco]

Great! Thank you so much!