ATTENTION FFSF MEMBERS: Our .FFaddon code needs an update!

[Goku7]

As you may (or may not, if you haven't gone thru the "Techpapers" section of the FFSF site) know, the .ffaddon files are basically ".rar" files with the extention changed to .ffaddon.  With the release of the newer versions of WinRAR, any .FFAddon files made with them will not be handled correctly by the config program.

Case in point:  The problem iceydamo is having when he tries to use the configurator to install the latest version of the FF9mod, due to the fact that the ffaddon file it uses was created using the newest release of WinRAR.

See this thread for what I'm talking about.

The newer WinRAR apparantly uses a compression algrithim that is different enough to prompt older versions of the WinRAR decompressor code to dismiss the files as "corrupted".  Note that I said that the older versions of WinRAR only think the files in the .rar archive are corrupt, for some reason the folder structure of archives made with the newer version will still be "extracted"; only they'll be empty directories.

These are EXACTLY the same symptoms that iceydamo is experiencing with trying to get the configurator to "install" the ffaddon file.

Now, how to fix it?  I'm not sure, but perhaps it's simply as easy as updating the addon.dll file by taking one of the dll files from the new version of the WinRAR decompressor and overwriting the existing addon.dll with it...

Either way, something needs to be done.  I do want to say that the newer version of the WinRAR program can handle archives made by older versions of the program just fine, so those members who still are using the older versions of WinRAR could continue to make working .ffaddon files if we update the program to accept the newer version's way of compressing things.

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Stupid typos.

[Aaron]

Send me an old copy of WinRAR, and I'll post it on FFSF for people wanting to develop FFAddon files

[Goku7]

Send me an old copy of WinRAR, and I'll post it on FFSF for people wanting to develop FFAddon files

Eh, what we really need to do is get the program to be compatible with the newer WinRAR compression algorthim, since that way, you could have it both ways.

Darn it, Fice, where are you?  I need to know if I'm right about the "addon.dll" file being a renamed dll from the stand-alone winRAR decompression dll set.  If that's the case, we could easily remedy it by packaging the new dll with the configurator (not to mention, I never found out for certain if the "illegal operation" bug that occured when you opened the controllers part of the config, was fixed in fice's version of the config..)

As it is right now, I can't send the older program even if I wanted to. :weep:

Why?  Because for some strange reason, my computer isn't playing nice with my Wireless Network Adapter, so I can't get onto the internet, much less my home network.  Obviously, I'm writing this from another comp.

[Goku7]

Ok, after finally finding some free time (darn job schedule...) to do some searching, I think I found a place that has both what seems like an updated version of something called "UnRARdll" (which if I'm not mistaken, is what we may be looking for, and had once used to create the level of RAR file support already in the FFconfigurator), and the source code behind it (which may prove to be necessary to have to get the FFConfig program to work with the new dlls...), should any of the programmers here feel up to the task.

The site:  http://www.rararchiver.com/download.html

Oh, and Aaron:

I also managed to dig up an install program for an older version of WinRAR (ver2.8, I think), that should produce ffaddon files compatible with the RAR support the config program has.

In light of the fact that simply dumping the main UnRAR dll file into the FFConfigurator's folder (and renaming it to where it should use that instead of the the older dll), doesn't work in terms of upping the compatibility (hey, it was worth a shot! ), I'm gonna send this older version of WinRAR, like you suggested.

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Doh!  Forgot the link!