[WIP] Windows Vista Extended Kernel

[Dixel]

3 hours ago, win32 said:

Considering the issues you just had, I'm not sure...

Hello , the guy wrote " I have updated my Vista till Jan. 2020" . Perhaps this is the issue.

[Win10-Hater]

41 minutes ago, Dixel said:

Hello , the guy wrote " I have updated my Vista till Jan. 2020" . Perhaps this is the issue.

How can that be? I had installed Vista Home premium x64 on a vm just for extended kernel testing purposes and server 2008 updates did not break the October version of extended kernel in any way. So I went ahead and installed all server 2008 updates on my physical Vista machine. I am guessing the Nov. 2020 build is not very much different from last month's build, am I correct @win32?

[tamarindojuice]

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Edited November 25, 2020 by tamarindojuice

[Dixel]

19 hours ago, TECHGEEK said:

How can that be? I had installed Vista Home premium x64 on a vm just for extended kernel testing purposes and server 2008 updates did not break the October version of extended kernel in any way. So I went ahead and installed all server 2008 updates on my physical Vista machine. I am guessing the Nov. 2020 build is not very much different from last month's build, am I correct @win32?

win32 says updates should be only up to April 2017. After that decrease in performance happened . Some antivirus "features" added or smth like that, I don't know . 

[Win10-Hater]

3 hours ago, Dixel said:

Some antivirus "features" added or smth like that, I don't know . 

Any way to disable/remove these features?

[Dixel]

On 11/24/2020 at 8:36 PM, TECHGEEK said:

Any way to disable/remove these features?

I honesly didn't do any research regarding this issue earlier . But as far as I can see now , it's impossible - It has something to do with the famous "meltdown" patch . Oh , by the way , what do you need all those updates for ? It's likely they don't do any good . I run absolutely virgin SP2 for my internet PC for more than 11 years and SP1 for gaming (almost 13 years). The only updates I installed is what was really needed (like DX11 for the games) , VCRedist and Net 4.5.1 (the fastest for Vista in my experience). Recently I installed the one that win32 suggested, just for testing , I will delete it later , I can't say it is bad . It somewhat improved the sound in SP2 (which is good since SP2 sounds much worse than SP1) , but at the same time my boot speed is slower now. Yet again , I don't see any marginal improvement from installing updates. You're better off with a good firewall .

[Dixel]

On 11/20/2020 at 8:02 PM, win32 said:

This is a known .NET bug, Apparently this solution is like this:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42554944/how-to-solve-this-exception-culture-is-not-supported

But I don't get it, as fr-FR should be valid.

Hi , I've come across this info "On Windows 7 and later operating systems, the .NET Framework retrieves culture data from the operating system ... The CultureNotFoundException is thrown if the operating system is unable to find the culture..."

Is that true ? Isn't that why I can't solve this problem with the game ? Any other way to "tell" the game what culture is needed ? Thanks

https://forums.asp.net/t/2080862.aspx?CultureNotFoundException+can+occur+when+culture+is+set+to+auto+in+web+config

[win32]

1 hour ago, Dixel said:

Hi , I've come across this info "On Windows 7 and later operating systems, the .NET Framework retrieves culture data from the operating system ... The CultureNotFoundException is thrown if the operating system is unable to find the culture..."

Somehow I doubt this is exactly true. This MS page says that: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globalization.culturenotfoundexception?view=net-5.0

But another one (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globalization.cultureinfo?view=net-5.0) says this:

Quote

In .NET Framework 4 and later versions, cultural data is provided by the Windows operating system.

And .NET 4.0 supports XP and Vista as well. Although there were a couple of locale-related functions I tried to bring over from 7. They are quite stubby and worked sufficiently well for the target applications (think it was newer Chromium browsers). But I can remove them for this specific case if necessary.

[Dixel]

4 hours ago, win32 said:

Somehow I doubt this is exactly true...

Well, it is sad, everything seems to be ok, except this. Have you ever thought of creating portable launchers to such evil programs/games with emulating options ? By the way , any news regarding Opera ? I've tried again with the newest files , nothing happens , it just doesn't show any errors . do you know why ?

By the way , chromium also doesn't work without the flag mentioned by the banned user.

Edited November 28, 2020 by Dixel

[Dixel]

On 11/27/2020 at 9:54 PM, win32 said:

Somehow I doubt this is exactly true. This MS page says that: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globalization.culturenotfoundexception?view=net-5.0

But another one (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.globalization.cultureinfo?view=net-5.0) says this ...

Well , that link link that I sent , they were talking something about the browsers not being able to identify the locale . At least it seems to look like a good coincidence , didn't you hear , chromium on Vista is not able to identify the locale upon installing any extensions . Perhaps there's some truth to it ?

[Dixel]

On 11/2/2020 at 9:01 AM, win32 said:

I couldn't find any version checks in any of the NVIDIA HDA files...

Well , I have some news regarding HD audio on Vista . I have tested a ton of programs that support  DTS HD MA passthrough to receiver and only one (I think Chinese) player was able to get it working for a small amount of time. The reciever confirmed that it is DTS HD MA and I definitely could hear the difference ! It was more like a glitch , when switching between files with DD 5.1 and DTS HD MA it switched to it and I was able to listen the file till the end , then it defaulted to compressed DTS again. Any ideas how to get it permanent ? Registry hacks are not working . It is definitely an artificial block . All I'm saing is that Vista's original files are capable of HD , just some setting prevents the use it.

Honestly , I'm in shock . Don't any of you ,fellow members, use HD audio these days?

Edited November 29, 2020 by Dixel

[win32]

11 hours ago, Dixel said:

Well , that link link that I sent , they were talking something about the browsers not being able to identify the locale . At least it seems to look like a good coincidence , didn't you hear , chromium on Vista is not able to identify the locale upon installing any extensions . Perhaps there's some truth to it ?

Based on further review of Chromium behaviour, it seems that on both Vista and 7 it does the same procedure to check for locales, using functions introduced in Vista or earlier. The error message indicates that the default locale is defined, but default data is not, presumably referring to the manifest data for the extensions.

11 hours ago, Dixel said:

Any ideas how to get it permanent ? Registry hacks are not working . It is definitely an artificial block . All I'm saing is that Vista's original files are capable of HD , just some setting prevents the use it.

The nuclear solution would be to modify ntoskrnl and set its RtlGetVersion (also PsGetVersion to be sure, even though it is obsolete as of XP) to 6.1.7601, thus everything in kernel mode would think they are running on Windows 7.

Personally I connect my GPU to my 15 year old monitor with DVI, and use Realtek onboard HD audio.

On another note, the user-mode version check bypass in ntext is not as effective as possible, as I realized that VerifyVersionInfo functions call RtlVerifyVersionInfo which is presently only in ntdll, and thus uses ntdll's RtlGetVersion. However, RtlVerifyVersionInfo is a bit of a handful, and with the limitations on implementing ntext functions, it will take awhile.

Edited November 29, 2020 by win32

[Dixel]

12 hours ago, win32 said:

"Based on further review of Chromium behaviour, it seems that on both Vista and 7 it does the same procedure to check for locales...."

Hi , thanks for the quick reply , is there any way to make everything in English , so it won't check at all ? I think most of us here wouldn't mind to use English only. I can write a portable launcher to pass these parameters to the main .exe. Is there any flag to switch off this "locale checking" ? The ones that I see do not have to do anything with the installation procedure. Oh , and by the way , it says : default data couldn't be "loaded" , not defined.

https://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/

 

 

[Dixel]

12 hours ago, win32 said:

The nuclear solution would be to modify ntoskrnl and set its RtlGetVersion (also PsGetVersion to be sure, even though it is obsolete as of XP) to 6.1.7601, thus everything in kernel mode would think they are running on Windows 7.

Personally I connect my GPU to my 15 year old monitor with DVI, and use Realtek onboard HD audio...

Yeah , I too use a 24' CCFL 15 year old monitor and loving it very much. But DTS HD MA is ancient by modern standards and should be supported by ancient hardware, including Realtek (for examplle 2nd Generation Intel Core mobo's) , Nvidia's cards starting from GTX460 (I think, maybe even earlier). Do you remember the times when there was a small cable that we needed to attach to the motherboard's SPDIF and connect to Nvidia's DVI to bypass the digital sound. GTX 8800 definitely had this "feature" . I guess Nvidia was cutting the costs of the production so we needed to use onboard sound , later they added their own chip and it 100% supports DTS HD MA , I guess starting from 2010 or so. 

[Dixel]

16 hours ago, win32 said:

... On another note, the user-mode version check bypass in ntext is not as effective as possible, as I realized that VerifyVersionInfo functions call RtlVerifyVersionInfo which is presently only in ntdll, and thus uses ntdll's RtlGetVersion. However, RtlVerifyVersionInfo is a bit of a handful, and with the limitations on implementing ntext functions, it will take awhile.

Well , I don't think this will help because I've installed the driver manually, avoiding Nvidia's auto installer.

I've spent another several hours trying different drivers and registry hacks. As far as I can see , there is just not enough info for the players to "see" HD audio capable device . Take a closer look at the Vista's registry entries under :

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\MMDevices\Audio\Render\{my receiver auto generated id}\Properties]

For example, HDAUDIO string is missing , compared to W7 entries . So I changed the .inf file (added everything from W7 sections to the Vista ones) and when I try to install this driver manually Vista says driver is not signed , I pressed ignore and the installation went ok , but it didn't change anything . Still not enough needed entries in the "MMDevices". It is painfully annoyning to add them manually for each device , esp. since the names are auto generated .

At least now I know what's the culprit and who's to blame . I think Nvidia made it that way so one couldn't use HD audio on Vista. I will not purchase their products anymore . I've been their fan for almost 20 years. Any ideas ? Thanks.