I have had very bad success rate with my old Windows CDROM/DVD era games. Pretty much all of them either have some kind of DRM or they run but with bugs.
When available I just buy the GOG versions instead, but even those versions sadly often have issues.
Meanwhile slightly older games from the DOS era works perfectly everywhere thanks to DOSBox. I would love to see something like that for old Windows. Merge DOSBox with WINE, someone?
> Microsoft has only kept the documentation for the DX8 version of EnumDevices left online
This saddens me. Who knows how much valuable info has been lost. I recall back in the days of MSDN, we had docs back to early Windows, and it was a wonderful historical record. Today's Docs site seems to keep info only for a few versions.
AFAIK they are all backed up. For the blogpost I used the DX5 SDK docs, DX7 SDK docs, and the MSDN Library from VS2005 (last version to include 9x information).
The VS2008 version purged all API information regarding pre-Windows 2000.
Oh geez, I have them, probably from the 00's. I tried to get into Windows programming, but it was all over my head.
Incredible that a few decades after thinking "All the world's knowledge will be online", we probably have to return to physical libraries to find the knowledge that ended up not being online anymore.
Its interesting to see how bad assumptions that almost certainly held up at the time really don't any more and that leads to this bug being exposed. Modern machines have a lot more addressable devices and a failure to properly filter and using a vector ultimately leads to a bug that on the surface feels like since it works on Win98 must be caused by Windows but isn't.
I was quite interested in the patch -- am I right in thinking the DirectX library only exports a single function and _everything_ else is through DX interfaces?
I expected to see significantly more code, pass-through to the original DLL.
The cool part of this adventure is that the author was able to write this DLL patch purely in rust! Good testament of how far it has come. Can't wait to see more C code ported to either Golang or Rust!
This is pretty amazing, and I'm surprised in a sense by how few workarounds you've had to implement. It makes me wonder what Windows would look like if we had Win2K or Win7 with today's system APIs (for high DPI, increased security etc.)
I know Windows has made great strides in security, but I deeply miss the old Windows and this really hits home about how _little_ has fundamentally changed, or rather, how much the continuance of these APIs means today's Windows could be like old Windows, if MS wanted.
I came across Windhawk a couple of days ago here on HN, a system to patch Windows to look and behave more old-style; wow.
When available I just buy the GOG versions instead, but even those versions sadly often have issues.
Meanwhile slightly older games from the DOS era works perfectly everywhere thanks to DOSBox. I would love to see something like that for old Windows. Merge DOSBox with WINE, someone?
Otherwise, 86Box is a pretty good full-system emulator for everythign up to the early 3D era
This saddens me. Who knows how much valuable info has been lost. I recall back in the days of MSDN, we had docs back to early Windows, and it was a wonderful historical record. Today's Docs site seems to keep info only for a few versions.
The VS2008 version purged all API information regarding pre-Windows 2000.
Incredible that a few decades after thinking "All the world's knowledge will be online", we probably have to return to physical libraries to find the knowledge that ended up not being online anymore.
I expected to see significantly more code, pass-through to the original DLL.
Yup! That's why I didn't have to create a gazillion passthrough functions.
The original DLL in my modern Windows installation has these 8 exports:
The game only calls DirectInputCreateA, and the rest happens via the COM object that that function creates.Seems pretty straightforward. They hook DirectInputCreateA() and pass their own device enumeration wrapper with the offending flag removed.
The idea is, rather than handle up to 8 devices, otherwise UB and usually crash, handle up to 8 "joysticks" and disregard any beyond that.
Interesting article, thank you.
I know Windows has made great strides in security, but I deeply miss the old Windows and this really hits home about how _little_ has fundamentally changed, or rather, how much the continuance of these APIs means today's Windows could be like old Windows, if MS wanted.
I came across Windhawk a couple of days ago here on HN, a system to patch Windows to look and behave more old-style; wow.