I created .CAB and .EXE installers for Windows Mobile

halr9000 · Post by **halr9000** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:25 pm

I happened upon ScummVM again recently and wanted to try it on my Windows Mobile PDA only to find out that it’s shipped in a .ZIP file rather than the conventional installers most people prefer. So, I made one.

Below are .CAB and .EXE installers for ScummVM 0.10. They were created using the excellent Installation Creator software by Aperitto Software.

http://halr9000.com/article/400

The project file is included on the page so that someone on the project team can take what I've done and very quickly maintain an official package.

If you appreciate this or if there are any problems with it, please leave comments on my blog. Enjoy.

knakos · Post by **knakos** » Thu Jul 19, 2007 1:54 pm

I generally dislike the cab/win32 intel exe method of installing on devices, as it's less flexible. But that's just my opinion, if people find this method easier to use and practical, we may consider switching to that.

spookypeanut · Post by **spookypeanut** » Wed Jul 25, 2007 12:11 pm

I dislike exe, as I generally use linux, but cab is ok. My only problem with zip is that if you want to unzip it on the device itself, it takes aaaages ...

halr9000 · Post by **halr9000** » Fri Jul 27, 2007 7:18 pm

knakos wrote:I generally dislike the cab/win32 intel exe method of installing on devices, as it's less flexible. But that's just my opinion, if people find this method easier to use and practical, we may consider switching to that.

If I may say so, you are probably in the minority. Especially when talking about people with wireless devices. I can click on a .cab link on a webpage and be playing a game 20 sec later. (ScummVM being larger than most PDA apps; of course it takes longer.)

Plus the only way most newbies will install something is with a Win32 installer. This applies to software in general on a Windows PC as well as Windows Mobile.

I think you should give the public the choice IMHO.

P.S. If you've got a nice sized storage card, a really great "device restore" method is to take all your software CABs and put them on the storage card. After a hard reset you can quickly get everything back to normal, especially if you've got your PIM data either backed up (using PIMbackup) or are syncing to an Exchange server. 100% back to business in the field with no PC involved.

Pa9an · Post by **Pa9an** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:36 pm

Seems that I'm part of that 'minority' as well

I dislike CAB and EXE installers for the same non-flexibility reason, as I tend to organize my device's storage card in a different manner than what is the 'default' for most CAB's and EXE's. E.g. I am installing games into a subdir called "Spiele" in the root of the card, instead of having games installed in the Program Files/Games dir or whatever those CAB's set up.
Having a CAB installer for ScummVM would mean I always would have to manually move things around and potentially change reg keys to reflect what I want.

So I'm definitely happy the way it is now, one zip file which I can extract wherever I want...

halr9000 · Post by **halr9000** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 2:20 pm

Pa9an wrote:I am installing games into a subdir called "Spiele" in the root of the card, instead of having games installed in the Program Files/Games dir or whatever those CAB's set up.

Yeah, organization is a very personal thing. You know, you might be interested in actually using the CAB creator software itself. You could turn those zip files into a CAB installer that places things in "Spiele" yourself.

I think it's good to give the users options though. Having a .CAB and .EXE available for download might make a few people besides myself happy.