Building the LANCommander Win9x Launcher

This launcher targets Windows 95/98 and is built as a 32-bit native executable with MinGW + wxWidgets 2.8.x. The same Makefile works on Linux (cross-compile) and on Windows (via MSYS2).

Vendor dependencies

Before building on any platform, drop these single-file libraries into vendor/ (they are intentionally not committed):

Path	Source	License
`vendor/cjson/cJSON.{c,h}`	https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON	MIT
`vendor/miniz/miniz.{c,h}`	https://github.com/richgel999/miniz	MIT
`vendor/sqlite/sqlite3.{c,h}`	https://sqlite.org/download.html (the "amalgamation" zip)	Public domain

Building on Linux (cross-compile)

sudo apt install g++-mingw-w64-i686 make
# Build wxWidgets 2.8.x for i686-w64-mingw32 (see "wxWidgets" below)
make WX_CONFIG=/path/to/wx-2.8/bin/wx-config

Building on Windows (MSYS2)

Use MSYS2 with the 32-bit MinGW toolchain. Visual Studio is not supported (the Makefile uses GCC-only flags such as -static-libgcc, -static-libstdc++, -mwindows, and wx-config).

1. Install MSYS2

Download from https://www.msys2.org and run the installer. After install, open the MSYS2 MINGW32 shell (not "MSYS", not "MINGW64" — Win9x needs 32-bit).

2. Install the toolchain

pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-gcc mingw-w64-i686-make

3. Build wxWidgets 2.8.x

MSYS2 ships wxWidgets 3.x in its repos; this project is pinned to 2.8.x and must be built from source. Grab wxMSW-2.8.12.zip (or any 2.8.x release) from the wxWidgets archive, extract it, then from the MINGW32 shell:

cd /c/path/to/wxWidgets-2.8.12
./configure --host=i686-w64-mingw32 \
            --prefix=/c/wx-2.8 \
            --enable-jpeg --enable-png \
            --disable-shared --enable-unicode=no
make && make install

--enable-jpeg --enable-png is required — cover art will not render without JPEG/PNG image handlers. --disable-shared keeps the launcher from depending on wxWidgets DLLs at runtime, which is what you want for distribution.

4. Build the launcher

cd /c/path/to/LANCommander.Launcher.Win9x
mingw32-make WX_CONFIG=/c/wx-2.8/bin/wx-config \
             CXX=g++ CC=gcc

In the MINGW32 shell g++ / gcc are already the i686 mingw compilers, so overriding CXX / CC away from the Linux-style i686-w64-mingw32-g++ default is what lets the same Makefile work here.

Output is lancommander.exe next to the Makefile.

Building on Windows (WSL2)

If you already use WSL, install a distro and follow the Linux instructions above inside it. You will still need to build wxWidgets 2.8.x from source — recent Ubuntu releases removed the libwxgtk2.8-dev package.

Targets

make — build lancommander.exe
make clean — remove object files and the binary

Runtime requirements

The resulting binary statically links libgcc and libstdc++ and only depends on Win9x-era system DLLs (wininet, wsock32, shell32, plus the wxWidgets DLLs if you built wx with --enable-shared). No .NET runtime is required, which is why this launcher exists as a separate project from the Blazor/Photino and Avalonia launchers.

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