# Installers, Saves, Fonts, and the Parts Around the Game

> A silent 7-Zip installation and progress on saves, fonts, and audio brought more ordinary Windows behavior into the development stack.

Canonical page: https://pyrosoft.pro/blog/installers-saves-fonts-and-audio

Live development journal; no publication date.
Work period: 2026-08-21 to 2026-08-22
Updated: 2026-10-20

I want Ferrum to run useful software through its normal workflow. That includes the installer, the files it creates, and what happens after you close the program. A game rendering a scene is exciting, but it still needs a sensible place to put a save and the Windows state its installer expects to find.

One concrete result in this period was the silent installation of the original 7-Zip 26.02 x64 setup. The recorded test checked the installed files against the archive, along with timestamps, shortcuts, registry changes, and the process exit. The record reports 107 matching installed files. That is a result for that installer and build, rather than evidence that every Windows installer works.

Hollow Knight work also reached a save-file milestone. One synchronization investigation found a mutex held across a wait, blocking the other work needed to make progress. Fixes like that are easy to describe as a speed improvement, but they also affect correctness: whether a program can finish the work it already asked to do.

Fonts and audio were getting more attention too. The GDI font surface gained real font data and glyph work through CoreText. The MIDI path was connected to native Mac facilities. These changes filled in pieces that an application may use before its main content ever appears. They also exposed remaining problems, including audio initialization and lifetime behavior that still needed their own fixes.

The opening-video work continued through this period as well, with later records showing the sequence advancing. Taken together, these were more realistic application behaviors than the first small executables could exercise. They also made it clear how many layers an ordinary launch depends on.

I'm keeping the historical installation result separate from the newer command-line archive tests covered later in this series. They use different 7-Zip versions and different builds. Both are useful, but combining them into a single claim that the entire application is finished would hide the work still needed.