Progress towards the initial 1.9.x beta build (Patreon)

As some of you may have seen, I posted a screenshot a few days ago on social media showing off an in-progress change related to WACUP's non-legacy mode where modern skins will finally be usable under it. As such we're now into the 1.9.x series of builds :)

Since then I've been improving my implementation of the apis that the modern skin engine plug-in (gen_ff) required from the original winamp program exe to work & it's gradually coming together with most of the stability issues I've been having resolved though there's still a few that I'm seeing which I need to find a solution for (aka how to further workaround what look to be gen_ff issues along with the mess that is the performance issues of the cPro based skins).

That's not been the only focus since the last beta build ~5 weeks ago & to save me prattling on too much over things I've attached the w.i.p. changelog from my dev build. Overall it's a lot of small changes to try to reduce cpu load & memory usage with probably too much time spent looking at code profiling results but every little helps :)

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Things still to be done before a new beta build is ready relate to the local library artwork handling (which was meant to be the focus but I was stuck on something related to it & 3 weeks later we get gen_ff loading in non-legacy mode so yeah I need to get back on with that) & looking at how to better ensure installation can work if a valid 5.666 installer cannot be obtained which is already getting harder since last year.

The last part is something that's needed as part of the process to ensure WACUP can run without needing to re-use too much from 5.666 (which isn't too much compared to how this started out as per https://getwacup.com/dev_files.html#winamp).

Whether this makes into into the next beta build or comes a bit later or at all (something is needed even if most is replaced due to gen_ff being more involved to replace at this time), the intent is to not have the WACUP installation hard abort if the 5.666 installer cannot immediately be found & look into a more on-demand manner to get them.

For now it's gen_ff + freetype, in_dshow & in_mp3 + aacdec (this last pair being the most important especially for making the x64 test builds viable for a wider audience) which are needed to have something that'll do most of what's needed with other parts (e.g. the portables support) earmarked for replacements &/or just not being used going forward (not forgetting that in_dshow & in_mp3 themselves need to have replacements made).

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With that rambling back to coding for me & a thank you for the continued support from you all 👍

-dro