A binary that runs on Win9X and WinNT

[Lars Marius Garshol]

Nearly all functions in the Win32 API that use strings have
wide-string and 8-bit-string versions, but hardly any of the
wide-string versions are implemented on Win9X.

When a program uses UTF-16 internally for all text and makes heavy use
of the Win32 API, how can one make a single binary run on both Win9X
and WinNT?

We have considered implementing compatibility versions of the
wide-string functions that basically map to code-paged text, but this
seems like an awful lot of work and in any case it seems basically
incredible that nobody has done this before.

What is the usual approach to this problem?

--Lars M.