Works on Windows hosted mode of Icaros Desktop are almost complete, at least for my side of things: although I couldn't in any way enhance the way AROS itself behaves under Windows (so: no 3D acceleration, no sound support, no networking, less stability etc), I'm almost done with Icaros features and, in particular, I am really proud about HostBridge under Windows. It got far better than what it was long ago. See it with your eyes:
Windows installation script now creates some Windows related environment variables inside Envarc:Icaros which allow to create some very convenient ASSIGNs like "Program Files:", "Program Files (x86):" and "Windows:", pointing to the directories where 64 bit apps, 32 bit ones and system files are stored. This makes manual importing of programs inside HostBridge quicker and easier.
But, as I said and shown on video, HostBridge can now import Windows applications from the Start Menu automatically. This is almost true because, in order to allow this, I had to parse all the user-readable directories where LNK files are stored. Moreover, while well written software stores the executable name in a field called "Relative path", others just use the "Arguments" field for everything, making translation to HostBridge files a real mess. For the time being, conversion scripts will ignore arguments because they are just too complex to handle. I plan, however, to better handle them in the future, just not right now, maybe with a better LUA GUI. If you double click on a Windows LNK file, Icaros now shows an "Unimplemented function" error message but, if you try to run a EXE, HostBridge will call the hbrun script to launch it for you.
Icaros.cmd boot script now accepts two switches that were available on Linux only:
-u will update Windows applications inside HostBridge: useful if you installed a lot of programs and they're still missing inside HostBridge's menu and folder
-U same as above, but clears HostBridge's host-app drawer from existing scripts. Useful if you made a real mess and you wish to clean things off. Dangerous if you've already imported programs manually.
Still to do: I am considering a further step to convert all imported icons to a fixed, 64x64 pixel square. That's because on heavily used system, with dozens of programs installed, showing huge icons embedded into programs can be really slow on AROS.
