Shareaza

Hello!

I see that the newest version of Shareaza (v2.5.1.0) requires a SSE-capable processor in order to run.

This is bad news for many people who run "24/7" homebuilt file/ftp/p2p/bittorrent clients/servers, because many of those machines are good old compact (and low power consuming) Pentium 2 PCs, or even older machines. Several of my friends use Pentium 2s, and I personally use a Pentium Pro 200 MHz for that purpose. They all run Shareaza quite fine. This program runs even on Windows NT4. Also, don't forget that the earliest AMD's processors with SSE support are Athlon XPs.

So, could you make SSE-based code in Shareaza optional? The program could detect the CPU type and then turn the SSE code on or off automatically (like the Xvid video coder does, for example). I believe that such code (both SSE and generic editions) could be made as external libraries, so that Shareaza would load one of them at startup (not both). That way Shareaza would not be bloated by having both editions loaded in RAM, while only one is needed for a particular PC.

Regards

You can't turn that code on or off... It has to do with the way of compiling the program, so we need to provide both versions, the SSE and the non-SSE version of Shareaza.

BTW, I think compiling a non-SSE version of Shareaza when publishing the next release, doesn't require much additional work as the change was relatively small.

I've asked Ryo for the exact change over here:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=352&p=3418#p3418

Therefore I would vote for compiling two versions of Shareaza, one with SSE instruction set and one without.

I think it would be ridiculous to have two separate versions. There is no great reason why SSE is required. Someone needs to come up with concrete performance benchmarks that show substantial differences in order to convince me breaking compatibility is a good thing.

I agree with your comments.

I would also like to know what are those significant benefits which "required" the cancellation of compatibility with Win9x.