Windows 9x Video Minidriver Source Code

As promised, here is the source code for the Windows 9x VirtualBox display minidriver. For discussion of the source code, see the included readdev.txt file.

The code was developed on a Windows 10 host system. For extra credit, I attempted to build the minidriver on Windows 9x. Ideally with source code control… but is that even possible?

I could not find any clear information on whether Mercurial ever worked on Windows 9x. After a longish software archaeology session, I concluded that it did, at least somewhat. Here’s the proof:

Developing with Mercurial on Windows 98

I used a Mercurial 1.1.2 installer downloaded from here. As far as I can tell, none of the downloads from the official site (Mercurial 1.4 and later) work on Win9x—Mercurial installs without complaints, but fails to do anything useful, possibly because of Python incompatibility with Windows 9x.

But Mercurial 1.1.2 works, least on Windows 98 SE and Windows Me. It fails to clone over HTTP on plain Windows 95 because the Python socket module won’t load. There may be a way to upgrade the Windows 95 socket support but that is of limited interest to me given that Windows 98 SE works without tweaking. I have not tried to figure out if and how well other Mercurial versions work, since 1.1.2 did the job I needed.

With the source code on a Windows 98 machine, it’s no problem building it with the Open Watcom C/C++ 1.9 compiler, it is just a question of running wmake. Happy hacking!