VISTA

[Damon]

Vista support?

[Paul Fenwick]

G'day Damon,

Damon wrote:
> Vista support?

Vista support is hard, for two big reasons:

1) I don't have a Vista machine.
2) Vista minesweeper uses different a different tileset and layout.

Having said that, with a machine to test it on, and information about the
tiles and layouts, SweeperBot could be updated to support Vista. However
such patches would need to come from another contributor, as I've got a
rather full plate at the moment!

The tiles work is tedious. Each tile needs to be extracted, signatured by
Image::Magick, and that signature recorded. The layout work would involve
figuring out where the "reset" (smiley button) is, and where the
win/lose/playing info is (on XP this is also the smiley), as well as how far
the playing board is from the edges of the window, and the tile sizes.

If you want to take a stab at updating the source code, let me know. You
can get the source just by unzipping the SweeperBot executable, but the
preferred way is to download or clone the repository at:

http://github.com/pfenwick/sweeperbot/

Cheerio,

Paul

--
Paul Fenwick <p...@perltraining.com.au> | http://perltraining.com.au/
Director of Training | Ph: +61 3 9354 6001
Perl Training Australia | Fax: +61 3 9354 2681

[Josef]

Any chance that you will at least support the "old" minesweeper on
vista?
I can run the XP winmine.exe fine on Vista, but I keep getting a
"Smiley not found on gameboard!" error.
Even if using the Classical GUI Design (Win 2k like)

[Paul Fenwick]

G'day Josef,

I suspect the problem here is a calibration one. SweeperBot walks through a
range of settings to determine the positioning of the game board. On Vista
I imagine the window dressing (borders and top-bar) are slightly different,
and it's screwing this up.

If you're feeling like playing with the code and have a Perl development
environment, you can try tweaking the MINIMUM_TOP_DRESSING and
MAXIMUM_TOP_DRESSING constants in App/SweeperBot.pm. You can actually unzip
the .exe file to get to all the code, although it can also be downloaded from:

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?App::SweeperBot

If that's not convienient, I can try rebuilding the .exe with a greater
range of board calibration settings, in the hope that it'll be able to
figure out the smiley position with more wiggle space. Unfortunately I
don't have easy access to a Vista system on which to test.

The good news is that thanks to Adam Kennedy (of Strawberry Perl fame) and
Microsoft, I *should* be able to gain access to a virtual Vista machine for
testing in the mid future. When that happens, adding (classical) support
should be significantly easier.

All the best,