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   linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:41:34 JST linear cannon

   trying to [write / sorta-reverse-engineer / understand] windows 95 drivers in 2023 is actually really difficult because there is almost no information remaining on the internet
   
   on any given topic i can only find just enough information from old forum posts or mailing lists to assure me that, once, long ago, there were answers, and tools, and ways to learn.
   
   yet the answers themselves are not to be found

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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:41:28 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     in theory i could use newer versions of windows but why would i do that
     
     technically, i do have access to 8.1 and a machine that i could, if i wanted to, put this PowerVR card into, but i simply do not want to
     
     the newest i think i'd be willing to go is xp. and i do have an xp machine around, but it's a UMPC so i can't exactly go sticking a pci card inside

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:41:30 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     now, the trick is, i'm not actually rewriting the windows 95 driver at the moment. i was thinking about doing that, but even with the stuff being released under MIT license, i decided if i'm going to be writing a kernel driver based on something partly reverse-engineered from a binary, i'm gonna have a different target for the driver to quash potential accusations of impropriety.
     
     so i'm targeting NT4 instead, since it still uses tools from the same era, will run the exact same unmodified .dlls and binaries, but has a dramatically different driver model
     
     ... i was also getting fed up with win9x crashing on me constantly, and NT4 is proving very stable after updates, with only one BSOD that was due to the hard drive dying underneath it

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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:41:31 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     my saving grace is that i have managed to get a pdf copy of what i believe is the exact "how to write a driver" book that the authors of the driver i am trying to re-write used
     
     and i believe their driver began as a carbon copy of all of the example code from that book, shoved together into a single project
     
     most of the rest of the functionality looks like stuff that started out in the userland side of the stack (which i have source for), and was eventually #ifdef'd out and moved into the kernel driver (conveniently with a comment to that effect in some instances)

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:42:19 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @linear Reminds me that I wish archive.org would provide a search engine or partner with one, there's a lot of stuff in it.
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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:44:13 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me kagi is usually pretty good about finding things in archive.org if that's the best place to look for them, especially if i've set it to look for pdfs (and because i've raised its priority, which is a thing kagi lets you do)
     
     but it still misses out a lot
     
     and there's stuff archive.org doesn't have (or doesn't have indexed) which google finds in google books / scholar, and kagi does not

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Nov-2023 03:46:54 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me e.g. the verbatim search "OnPnpNewDevnode" gives me almost nothing to go on in kagi, but gives me juuuust slightly more in google, and that tiny bit matters

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.