jimmsta Posted August 14, 2006 Share Posted August 14, 2006 Just a question - while waiting for a virus scan to finish on an old hard drive, I dove into the "old backup" folder, to find a Windows 95 GOLD installation... upon which, I went to the system folder, and looked at a few files under a hex editor... (I'm at work, and bought said hex editor for advanced data recovery purposes). What I found intriguing was NTKERN.VxD, which seems to have imports/exports for the NT Kernel. Is this in anyway associated with Kernel32.dll, or is it just a compatibility layer for some executables?I've always wondered what the Virtual Device Drivers were for, (I do know that the VMM files are part of Win9x's HAL, or Windowing server). My questions: Has anyone ever tried hacking away at these files? Is there any reason to attempt to do so? What is NTKERN.VXD? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marius '95 Posted August 15, 2006 Share Posted August 15, 2006 Great ideea! Since now Win9x supports large HDs and WinXP programs, what next? Some patches for "too much RAM" bug?I always wondered what is BIGMEM.DRV for? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oscardog Posted August 15, 2006 Share Posted August 15, 2006 Found this, hope it is of some helpWin32+ Driver Model (WDM) The Win32 Driver Model (WDM) is an all new, common driver model for Windows 95 and Windows NT+ . WDM will enable some common types of devices using USB and IEEE 1394 to have a single driver for both operating systems. The WDM has been implemented by adding selected NT Kernel services into Memphis Beta 1 via a special virtual device driver (NTKERN.VXD). This allows Memphis Beta 1 to maintain full legacy device driver support while adding support for new WDM drivers.andas it turned out, in the win98's VMM there is a cool vxd, called NTKERN.VXD, which provides some NT's INT 2E services. Mmoreover, INT 2E is used when win98 is loading, at that time such functions as ntoskrnl!NtPowerInformation are called. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jimmsta Posted August 22, 2006 Author Share Posted August 22, 2006 So, now the question is: How do we create them? Is there a way, or an advantage to creating a VxD as opposed to, say, an external program loaded at startup?It seems to me that VxD's are supposed to be Services running on the Win9x platform.In which case, is there a way to implement more functionality into NTKern.VxD, or what?What I'm trying to get at here, is... would it make more sense to hack ntkern.VxD instead of kernel32.dll, for the Kernel Update Project? NTKern is supposed to be some sort of supporting library/service for NT-specific system calls... which I take to mean that it would be the best place to put updated functionality, instead of kernel32.dll. I'm probably wrong, of course. I'd love to know the exact boot order of Win9x. (NT's bootorder wikipedia page is incredibly informative: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_Startup_Process ) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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