So I upgraded video drivers, and discovered that ATI had actually (apparently) removed much of the OpenGL functionality in those newer drivers. Shaders, VBOs, and several other long-standard features are completely gone.
Granted, it was an old machine, and a not-very-powerful video card. But removing features that used to be there.. well, that just seems kind of mean.
Anyhow, rather than struggle with that old beast any more (as it’s basically falling apart anyhow, even apart from the video driver issue), I’m setting up a newer Win32 development environment, in a virtual machine on my much newer computer. Amusingly, running virtualised, it’s about the same speed as the old machine (and has considerably more hard disk space). And hopefully it has all the shader support that I need, to debug the last big Win32 issues.
Long-term plan, of course, is to get a proper, real Win32 dev machine. But for right now, with my old machine dying on me and a build that I really want to get out.. I’m just going to have to bite the bullet and do the thing virtualised. Hopefully I should be up and coding again before the end of the day.
Update: Am now up and running, and the rest of my Win32 crashes and glitches have completely vanished. Either they were being caused by dodgy ancient hardware/drivers, or else I’ve got some code somewhere that works properly on my new machine’s NVidia card, but not on the old machine’s ATI. I’m building and testing a Win32 release version now. If all goes well, downloads should be up in about an hour.