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[WIP] Windows Vista Extended Kernel


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1 hour ago, mina7601 said:

So, logging in to Steam is possible, but Steam itself is unusable? Am I understanding that correctly?

The October 2020 version works if it is set to "big picture" mode. You will see store information and everything. But sometime after that, the login window switched to being rendered by CEF (Chromium) so it is not possible to sign in as there is no text, graphics or buttons on the login screen now.

As for the Intel drivers, I have a couple of systems that can use them but they are in very poor shape. Various differences in rendering quality are known to exist between Vista and 7 and I don't want Vista to be compromised by any changes I do. So I'll try to do something that doesn't "change" Vista to its detriment.

Also, the Vista extended kernel will be able to run Chromium 110 and 111, at least with --no-sandbox. I will try to get the sandbox working in time for the main release of Chromium 110 in February. I am adding the appropriate functions to kernel32 and userenv.
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I just checked the Chromium source code and discovered that the version nags are persistent now because they are not calling GetVersionEx* or similar to check the version, but they are checking the version number of kernel32 instead.

Edited by win32
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3 hours ago, win32 said:

The October 2020 version works if it is set to "big picture" mode. You will see store information and everything. But sometime after that, the login window switched to being rendered by CEF (Chromium) so it is not possible to sign in as there is no text, graphics or buttons on the login screen now.

As for the Intel drivers, I have a couple of systems that can use them but they are in very poor shape. Various differences in rendering quality are known to exist between Vista and 7 and I don't want Vista to be compromised by any changes I do. So I'll try to do something that doesn't "change" Vista to its detriment.

Also, the Vista extended kernel will be able to run Chromium 110 and 111, at least with --no-sandbox. I will try to get the sandbox working in time for the main release of Chromium 110 in February. I am adding the appropriate functions to kernel32 and userenv.
image.png

I just checked the Chromium source code and discovered that the version nags are persistent now because they are not calling GetVersionEx* or similar to check the version, but they are checking the version number of kernel32 instead.

I don't know too much about this, but I'm having issues with 32 bit apps which use OpenSSL 32 bit libs compiled with VS19+. Maybe you can check it. An example of that is Lynx browser, it sometimes don't connect or tells something regarding the certificates. But it also depends on the application which you use. Maybe these electron apps use such OpenSSL libraries?

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On 12/30/2022 at 10:42 AM, D.Draker said:

I don't know what that win-7 DX file does and why it is blurry, maybe it applies some sort of filters ?

Btw probably it's somewhat similar to the GTA San Andreas's orange atmosphere filter in PS2 version that isn't present in other platforms.

Are you looking for an exact culprit file that causes blurry-bluish rendering?

Edited by Brickedandroid
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On 12/31/2022 at 12:24 AM, Brickedandroid said:

Btw probably it's somewhat similar to the GTA San Andreas's orange atmosphere filter in PS2 version that isn't present in other platforms.

Are you looking for an exact culprit file that causes blurry-bluish rendering?

Why would I be looking ? For me everything works fine with the original Vista files. The exact culprit is Windows 7 and its files.

The rendering in Windows 7 is blurry, bluish and with heavy DNR filters applied, not only in that game, but in everything.

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On 12/30/2022 at 3:19 PM, win32 said:

1 - Various differences in rendering quality are known to exist between Vista and 7 and I don't want Vista to be compromised by any changes I do.

2 - So I'll try to do something that doesn't "change" Vista to its detriment.

3-  for the main release of Chromium 110 in February. I am adding the appropriate functions to kernel32 and userenv.

4 - I just checked the Chromium source code and discovered that the version nags are persistent now because they are not calling GetVersionEx* or similar to check the version, but they are checking the version number of kernel32 instead.

1- Yes, absolutely !  2 - thank you very much ! 3- But it had been already released acopule of months ago, otherwise they wouldn't be able to build Opera 96 from it.

4 - For now, doesn't seem to affect anything, I'd even say the startup of the browser (Opera 96 I hacked) is faster. Is this because it now skips GerVersionEx ?

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1 hour ago, D.Draker said:

Why would I be looking ? For me everything works fine with the original Vista files. The exact culprit is Windows 7 and its files.

The rendering in Windows 7 is blurry, bluish and with heavy DNR filters applied, not only in that game, but in everything.

An exact file in Windows 7 that has the main role for the filters

Edited by Brickedandroid
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5 hours ago, Brickedandroid said:

An exact file in Windows 7 that has the main role for the filters

I'm sorry, I have Zero interest in windwos 7/8/9/10/etc.

99.99% of my posts are Vista related, rather easy to notice.

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5 hours ago, D.Draker said:

3- But it had been already released acopule of months ago, otherwise they wouldn't be able to build Opera 96 from it.

The Chrome version 110 will come out in February, and Chromium-based browsers and applications will base themselves off 110 starting from then. Right now it is still somewhat obscure.

5 hours ago, D.Draker said:

4 - For now, doesn't seem to affect anything, I'd even say the startup of the browser (Opera 96 I hacked) is faster. Is this because it now skips GerVersionEx ?

Opening a file and checking its version information would be slower than what GetVersionEx does, which is to make a call to another function which accesses a data structure located in memory. But Chromium already did both and still does now. I think the big difference is that some Windows 8+ specific code paths are still being skipped in Opera.

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4 hours ago, win32 said:

The Chrome version 110 will come out in February, and Chromium-based browsers and applications will base themselves off 110 starting from then. Right now it is still somewhat obscure.

Things work in mysterious ways. Opera 96 had updated to 96.0.4653.0 on 02.01.2023 (today) to Chromium master 110.0.5464.2.

Earlier 96.0.4640.0 (on 20.12.2022) updated to Chromium on master to 110.0.5449.0 .

I haven't tried the 96.0.4653.0 , I'm lazy to patch everything all over again. Sorry for the previous "acopule" typo, it's the consequences of celebrations,

And Happy New Year !

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I'm working on getting Office 2013 to work on Vista, I tried an old method to install Office 2007 on Windows 2000.
I had to replace the gdiplus.dll that comes with Vista, with the one that comes with Windows 7.
But I get a license error, I have only tried project, I have not tried visio or the complete suite (Word, Excel, etc).
Then the office tools, such as the language configurator seem to work without any problem.

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1 minute ago, WinFX said:

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I'm working on getting Office 2013 to work on Vista, I tried an old method to install Office 2007 on Windows 2000.
I had to replace the gdiplus.dll that comes with Vista, with the one that comes with Windows 7.
But I get a license error, I have only tried project, I have not tried visio or the complete suite (Word, Excel, etc).
Then the office tools, such as the language configurator seem to work without any problem.

good work winfx! this is a really big achievement in what the extended kernel can do!

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1 hour ago, WinFX said:

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I'm working on getting Office 2013 to work on Vista, I tried an old method to install Office 2007 on Windows 2000.
I had to replace the gdiplus.dll that comes with Vista, with the one that comes with Windows 7.
But I get a license error, I have only tried project, I have not tried visio or the complete suite (Word, Excel, etc).
Then the office tools, such as the language configurator seem to work without any problem.

I see "Setup Error" in your taskbar. I wonder why is that.

Anyway, this is really great, and I hope you get Office 2016 to work on Vista as well.

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14 minutes ago, mina7601 said:

I see "Setup Error" in your taskbar. I wonder why is that.

Anyway, this is really great, and I hope you get Office 2016 to work on Vista as well.

It's a license error

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News about Office 2013 on Windows Vista

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The full suite of Office 2013 Pro Plus installed on Windows Vista. A dream come true, maybe...

I have managed to install Office 2013 on Vista and I have the method so that it can be installed without errors (it works with any program in the suite, except for Visio, which appears as an unconfigured application when trying to start it). It remains to see a problem about the license not being found, the same problem occurs in Windows 2000 when installing Office 2007 with a very similar manual, which is solved by importing a Windows XP key with the same installed copy of Office 2007. I will have to try if it works by installing my copy of Office 2013 on Windows 7 and importing that key into Vista. But then there are programs from the suite that are unfortunately unusable (at least for now). Some extra programs like "Send to OneNote" seem to work correctly.

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Here is an image of "Send to OneNote 2013" working correctly. At the moment I do not want to share the method to install Office 2013, at least until I can solve the license problem.

When much of the suite works, I'll share a method in a separate topic and just dedicated to installing Office 2013 (and maybe newer versions) on Windows Vista, to make it easier to find.

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