CamTron

I've also looked into writing a display driver for Windows 9x, and I could be wrong, but I doubt there's any WDM support for it at all, even in 98SE and ME (please correct me if I'm mistaken). For the curious, here's an overview on how display drivers work on 9x. Graphics drivers for 9x are basically the same model as they were in Windows 3.1. That is, a 16-bit (yes, still 16-bit even in Windows ME) DLL (commonly with a .drv filename) which initializes hardware and implements every single GDI drawing function. A few things changed in Windows 95. The first is that drivers no longer have to implement all of GDI themselves (a huge pain in the arse for anyone writing Windows 3.1 graphics drivers) and can just call a Windows provided library called DIBENG to do so. The second is the introduction of Plug and Play, which requires writing a VxD to interact with it. Since VxDs are ring-0 32-bit code, it was common practice to put a lot of the hardware functionality into the VxD and have the 16-bit driver call the VxD to perform tasks, since 32-bit code performs better. I'm not entirely sure how Direct3D and OpenGL fit into this picture, as I've never gotten to that point. I know OpenGL uses Installable Client Drivers (ICDs) which are DLLs that replace the functionality of the Windows-provided opengl32.dll. Those ICDs likely call into the VxD to interact with the hardware and provide acceleration. Short of Intel releasing the source code to their old Windows drivers (We all know that ain't happening. Only their Linux drivers are open-source), there's not much we can do. The only viable option I see is to leverage something like Gallium3D and Mesa to provide hardware acceleration. Gallium3D is supposed to be an OS-independent framework for graphics drivers, but it's quite complex and really geared towards systems like Linux and the BSDs, and it would be a massive amount of effort to port that to Windows 9x. However, if OpenGL is supported, Direct3D shouldn't be too difficult as WineD3D can implement Direct3D on top of OpenGL.

I just use a simple FTP server app on my phone and connect to it wirelessly from pretty much any PC. FTP is widely supported from Windows 95 to Windows 11 and Linux and shows up just like a folder in Explorer. MTP is an absolute pain to get working unless you're on Windows 7 or above (even Linux has trouble supporting it) so I don't use that.

Surprised nobody mentioned Visual Basic 6.0 yet. Back in the day, that's what coding beginners used to make simple apps, and it's an easy language to learn. Delphi is another great option, though Object Pascal language isn't used much outside of Delphi these days. If you want to get serious with programming, you should eventually learn C and C++. The Windows API is a C API, but it's quite low level, so not recommended for beginners. Microsoft created a few wrapper APIs like MFC and WTL to make things simpler, though. Believe it or not, the latest Visual Studio still supports writing C# apps that target .NET 2.0 and will run on Windows 98. However, running such an app on 98 requires installing the massive .NET framework which is annoying if all you need it for is a simple program.

@jumper Is the source code for these newer versions available? It's been over a year. KernelEx is supposed to be an open source project, and having the source is crucial to continue development.

I'd have to agree. I played around with KernelEx years ago trying to see what software I could run, and finding all the DLL tweaks and kext configurations is exhausting. The information on this is scattered across a bunch of very long forum threads, and it's difficult to wade through. It would be great if someone could consolidate it on a wiki.

For wiping free space, there's the classic trick of creating a large junk file, copying it over and over until your entire hard disk is filled up, then deleting all of those copies. This effectively overwrites any leftover data in free space with junk.

Is the source code for these KernelEx updates available? It would be nice to be able to continue adding functions even if this project goes dead.

Is there a way to install a driver from a batch file in Windows 9x without going through Device Manager?

What Windows version is that on? Is it reproducible (happens even after a restart)?

I'm pleased to announce that this driver is approaching a usable state. Here is my new version with many of the aforementioned problems now fixed. Please keep in mind that this is still pre-release alpha software, and is rife with bugs. For testing purposes only. vboxdisp.7z Known bugs in this release: 16-color mode is broken and will result in an unreadable display. Only use this driver with 256 or more colors. Though in reality, you probably want more than 16 colors anyway. Resolutions above 1152x882 may cause the system to crash. Changing color depth in the Display Properties does not take effect unless the machine is restarted. You may occasionally get a message saying "Invalid VxD dynamic link call to device number 3, service B." when rebooting the machine. Switching in and out of full-screen DOS prompts too quickly may visually corrupt some characters. Going into a full-screen DOS prompt while other DOS prompts are on the screen may result in graphical glitches in the full-screen DOS prompt.

I managed to solve a few more issues! As of my latest code changes, DOS prompts now switch in and out of fullscreen mode correctly (which is something that even VBEMP has trouble doing), the graphical glitches are gone (caused by stack corruption in one of my functions), and the stability has improved dramatically. I've run into one case where the DDK documentation is WRONG! According to the 95 DDK (and the 98 DDK), the signature for the ValidateMode is: UINT WINAPI ValidateMode(DISPLAYINFO FAR *lpValMode); but in reality, it should be UINT WINAPI ValidateMode(DISPVALMODE FAR *lpValMode); It has this incorrect information in multiple places. While similar in name, the DISPLAYINFO and DISPVALMODE structures have very different layouts, and mixing them up will cause your code not to work as intended. Only by examining the sample code did I figure out that the struct pointer passed in should be DISPVALMODE.

Individual Windows XP updates can still be downloaded from the Microsoft Update Catalog. I suggest that we archive them and also generate a list of SHA-2 hashes so we can keep the update files and verify that they haven't been tampered with.

I was able to attach a file yesterday, so maybe this is fixed now?

Good news is I finally solved the freezing issue by adding BANKEDSCAN to the deFlags member of PDEVICE. I'm not entirely sure what caused it, but I suspect it has to do with a string instruction in DIB_BitBlt triggering an endless loop of page faults when trying to copy between video memory banks, since both the source and destination addresses of a string instruction must be mapped at the same time. Anyway, adding a few flags causes the DIB engine to work around the issue. I might switch to using the graphics adapter's linear framebuffer mode in the future.

I now have a partially functional graphics driver! Source code is included along with a floppy image (install.img) that can be installed in a VM. Please note that this is only compatible with VirtualBox and will not install on any other virtual machine software. Issues: Attempting to open a DOS prompt on Windows 95 will cause a BSOD. It seems to work okay in 98, except for full screen mode not being implemented yet. Hovering over menu items in Windows 95 is glitchy. Attempting to drag a window left or up, or attempting to scroll anything will completely lock up the system. No 2D acceleration yet, so everything is slow. This driver is highly unstable. Expect many random freezes, crashes, and BSODs. The Display properties dialog passes in garbage to my ValidateMode function when trying to determine valid resolutions and bit depths. I've hardcoded 640x480 32-bit color for now. The third bullet point is the most annoying one, and I'm at a roadblock as to figuring out what's causing it. Dragging a window to the left or up immediately hangs the machine. The mouse cursor can move, but nothing can be clicked on or interacted with. SoftICE isn't helping, either. It can detect faults and crashes, but has no way of isolating a freeze. vboxdisp.7z