buckchow

Probably not. The devs gutted the old file explorer when scrambling to cobble together scraps of junk and force Vista out the door. Don't forget that development of Vista had terribly fallen apart earlier and it was released much later than intended. That OS was an incredible mess, especially at launch, and things that were broken or removed so it could be released relatively quickly still show through in the latest Windows releases today.

As of 8u261 Oracle changed to Visual Studio 2017 and now all components of Java 8 are being built for Vista or later. I checked a few files and didn't notice any Vista-specific dependencies, so patching the headers of every file for XP may get things running (minus sunmscapi of course). They're planning to give Java 7 the same VS 2017 treatment in October. 8u261 just added TLS 1.3 support so that's not very helpful if it can't be made to work. Fortunately at least one third-party option exists for that.

There's a thread in the Vista forum about getting certain versions of VMware Workstation and Player to work beyond the official supported versions. https://msfn.org/board/topic/180052-tutorial-how-to-install-vmware-workstation-11-or-12-in-vista/ Workstation 10 and Player 6 are the last versions officially supported on XP, 2003, and Vista. Early versions of Workstation 11 (and Player 7) won't install on XP/2003/Vista but when inspected the maximum requirement of any of the .sys drivers is NT 6.1 which corresponds to Vista SP1. In previous VMware versions there were additional, separate driver files for XP-based Windows versions (32-bit and 64-bit). Notably the vmx86_64 driver was shared by 64-bit XP/2003 and later versions of Windows, so there weren't separate versions. In VMware 11 it looks like no additional dependencies have been added to the vmx86_64 driver. Its minimum OS requirement has been bumped up from 5.2 to 6.0, but with the lack of new dependencies I'm guessing it would still work in XP if that limitation in the header were removed. Depending on how much the other drivers have changed, there's a small possibility that where the VMware 11 drivers are truly incompatible with XP/2003 64-bit the VMware 10.x 64-bit drivers may be able to replace them. I checked a couple of other drivers (but not all of them) and again noticed no change in dependencies for the Vista-compatible 10.x drivers vs. the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers. This is a good sign, but doesn't necessarily reflect whether the 11.x drivers are providing any new, critical functionality that wouldn't be present if the Vista-compatible 11.x drivers that the 11.x installers include are replaced by XP-compatible 10.x drivers. For example, if critical new functionality related to networking is absent inside the 10.x drivers the Workstation/Player software could potentially run but only if networking is always disabled. As far as the many DLL files that VMware 11 is bundled with, they all still seem to be built targeting NT 5.2 at most, but I'm not certain that I checked 100% of them. I plan to look into this a lot more in the future, but I don't have time now and this will likely get put off for months or longer. If anyone else wants to mess around with this I figured I'd share what I observed so far.

BlackWingCat: Do you have any plans to add support for EnumerateTraceGuids in ADVAPI32.DLL? I only ask because the "setup.exe" that is part of the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable depends on it to run. I've changed the OS and subsystem version values in the "setup.exe" header from 5.01 to 5.00 and the EnumerateTraceGuids function is the only dependency that remains on my system. FYI, I can complete the setup process by running the "vc_red.msi" installer that is in the same directory as "setup.exe", but it would be nice to be able to run the "setup.exe" file as well.

Sounds good. Thanks for the tip. FYI, I found another video application that doesn't seem to work with KDW: TMPGEnc MPEG Editor 3.0. It reports that an unsupported version of Windows is being used (both with and without KDW).

win2000: This looks like a very impressive project. Great work! Unfortunately, I've run into a couple of issues. 1) Not all CUDA applications work properly. In particular, the application "Badaboom" does not work properly. Badaboom opens up, can be configured, and input video files can be opened. However, all transcoding operations fail. Note that all CUDA applications require an nVidia 8xxx series card or newer as well as the CUDA driver, toolkit, and SDK. It probably isn't possible to add support for this without having a compatible nVidia card. 2) When SHELL32.DLL is replaced in system32, the application "SuperCopier 2" no longer works. SuperCopier 2 is an application that attaches to the shell to override normal Windows file copying. I'm very glad to see that this is still an active project. Keep up the good work. Greg