AMD Ryzen, etc with Windows Vista

[Jakob99]

Inspired by @D.Draker's success with getting newer Nvidia drivers to work with Windows Vista, I was wondering if it would be possible to get some newer AMD graphics drivers to work, say, the Radeon R4 98E4 Stoney Ridge and related cards that use the same driver. This has a 6.1 and a 6.3 section that is filled in of course, but at the very bottom, it has a blank 6.0 section. Given that is there, it can't be too much work to hack work it onto Vista, right? My AMD laptop that can run Vista is an Acer Aspire A315-21 with Radeon R4 Stoney Ridge 98E4 from 2019.

You can find the graphics driver I use for it here: https://www.mediafire.com/file/os5w3p1fb3ali8o/Win7-Radeon-Software-Adrenalin-2020-Edition-20.4.2-May25.zip/file

I know there is newer that still has the 6.0 section, but those invert the color in a game I play when the game is in full screen (non-full screen is fine) while these do not. It will be interesting to see if these can be leveraged to work on Vista. If so, it would open up the Vista compatibility door wide-open here. I should note the problems that plague Haswell+ and Ryzen do not happen here and I've recorded no problems from what I could gather in my test. If anyone testing Vista on this or related AMD Radeons like Stoney Ridge notices any problems I may have missed, please do post them here for me and other users.

October 17th, 2022: BREAKING NEWS: We may be one step closer to getting newer AMD Radeon graphics drivers such as for Stoney Ridge working with Windows Vista under Extended Kernel. Please stay tuned for more information on this as it comes in.

October 18th, 2022: BREAKING NEWS; A huge development has been reported! This just broke the Vista compatibility vault wide-opened! Unfortunately, it will be a bit before this is available to everybody. To learn more, go here: https://imgur.com/gallery/nGsYopn

October 22nd, 2022: I'm refocusing this thread to just AMD Ryzen from here on out. I do not have one, so I won't be participating as much, if at all in this iteration of the thread. If you have a modern Ryzen and want to try to get its graphics driver to work with Vista, then be my guest. Keep in mind, Ryzen dos have issues with Vista. These are different from the Haswell+ issues and I believe are related to the USB drivers (feel free to correct if wrong). Here's my new thread linked to below.

 

Edited October 27, 2022 by Jakob99
Changing thread focus.

[D.Draker]

17 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

Inspired by @D.Draker's success with getting newer Nvidia drivers to work with Windows Vista

Thank you , I'd gladly help you , unfortunatlely I don't own an AMD card and don't know anyone in my city who does. These are not popular here . Why ? It's a big question why .

Did you check for the missing dependencies already ? Without the card it'd impossible to say if they actually work . 

P.S.

I don't work for nVidia and NOT suggesting any members to buy it. Neither I don't want to start a popular discussion nVidia vs. AMD. Thanks.

[Jakob99]

45 minutes ago, D.Draker said:

Thank you , I'd gladly help you , unfortunatlely I don't own an AMD card and don't know anyone in my city who does. These are not popular here . Why ? It's a big question why .

Did you check for the missing dependencies already ? Without the card it'd impossible to say if they actually work . 

P.S.

I don't work for nVidia and NOT suggesting any members to buy it. Neither I don't want to start a popular discussion nVidia vs. AMD. Thanks.

Not yet, but I'll download CFF Explorer and check it out. The card works with Vista, but the drivers do not (despite the 6.0 section). You know how to find the version number (e.g. 6.1) in the driver .sys file via hex editor? I tried finding 01 76 and found it, but it wasn't right and I do not know how 6.1 would be interpreted in hex so any help on this would be greatly appreciated!

[D.Draker]

Jakob , check with Dependency walker x64  , CFF Explorer is only for replacing them and rebuilding the file. The version number , no, there would be no direct mentions of the versions , like win32 previously wrote . It's not a direct spell number , like in a game , it's more like you would need to just force it to skip the portion of the code that checks for the version so it would load anyways. He explained it , it's here somewhere in his or mine topic.

 

[Jakob99]

1 minute ago, D.Draker said:

Jakob , check with Dependency walker x64  , CFF Explorer is only for replacing them and rebuilding the file. The version number , no, there would be no direct mentions of the versions , like win32 previously wrote . It's not a direct spell number , like in a game , it's more like you would need to just force it to skip the portion of the code that checks for the version so it would load anyways. He explained it , it's here somewhere in his or mine topic.

 

I found it with CFF Explorer. I changed the references to 0006 and 0001 to 0006 and 0000. Gonna see what this does. If nothing, I'll check with Dependency Walker.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

I found it with CFF Explorer. I changed the references to 0006 and 0001 to 0006 and 0000. Gonna see what this does. If nothing, I'll check with Dependency Walker.

Did you rebuild the checksum , like in my tutorial ? But NOT the header.

[Jakob99]

2 minutes ago, D.Draker said:

Did you rebuild the checksum , like in my tutorial ? But NOT the header.

I sure did! About to install Vista on the laptop so I can check it.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

I found it with CFF Explorer. I changed the references to 0006 and 0001 to 0006 and 0000. Gonna see what this does. If nothing, I'll check with Dependency Walker.

In the driver itself or in the installer executable ? BTW , you'd need to decrapify the whole package first , remove the spying files/stupid plugins , etc.

[D.Draker]

I'd also suggest to start frome the oldest available and then move onwards if you want to. I don't know if you saw , in 2017 - 2019 nVidia added a ton of crap that simply causes nothing but glitches .

I suspect AMD did exactly the same.

[Jakob99]

9 minutes ago, D.Draker said:

In the driver itself or in the installer executable ? BTW , you'd need to decrapify the whole package first , remove the spying files/stupid plugins , etc.

In atihdw76.sys and amdlog.sys.

[D.Draker]

5 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

amdlog.sys.

amdlog.sys's description is " AMD LOG UTILITY DRIVER ", remove the spying file

Constant BSOD page_fault_nonpaged_area AMDLOG.sys

https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/constant-bsod-page-fault-nonpaged-area-amdlog-sys/td-p/154686/page/3

[Jakob99]

5 hours ago, D.Draker said:

amdlog.sys's description is " AMD LOG UTILITY DRIVER ", remove the spying file

Constant BSOD page_fault_nonpaged_area AMDLOG.sys

https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/constant-bsod-page-fault-nonpaged-area-amdlog-sys/td-p/154686/page/3

Interesting. I will do that. I did try to install by changing 0006 and 0001 to 0006 and 0000 and by adding in the hardware/device ID's to the Vista section, but I got Code 39. I did not disable driver signature enforcement, but I do not think that would make a difference. I'll try Dependency Walker later to see what it picks up.

[D.Draker]

3 hours ago, Jakob99 said:

I did not disable driver signature enforcement, but I do not think that would make a difference.

You will achieve nothing then . You can read our lengthy discussion with win32 regarding this subject. 

Code 39 means Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware . Why ?

Take a guess . In the case of modded drivers it's usually because you did not disable driver signature enforcement.

[D.Draker]

Two times "etc, etc" in the title.

[Jakob99]

12 hours ago, D.Draker said:

You will achieve nothing then . You can read our lengthy discussion with win32 regarding this subject. 

Code 39 means Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware . Why ?

Take a guess . In the case of modded drivers it's usually because you did not disable driver signature enforcement.

Ah. I'll try that and report back.