From: ovek AT arcticnet DOT no (Ove Kaaven)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Loading Windows95 DLL's under Plain DOS.
Date: Wed, 07 Jan 1998 08:26:42 GMT
Organization: Arctic Net AS
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Message-ID: <34b3370f.463119424@news.arcticnet.no>
References: <9801070651 DOT AA22194 AT gcef DOT gc DOT maricopa DOT edu>
NNTP-Posting-Host: village-dos.arcticnet.no
To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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"Joshua James Turpen" <44699 AT ef DOT gc DOT maricopa DOT edu> wrote:

>I've recently begun a project to load Windows 95 DLL's under plain vanilla
>DOS.  My ultimate goal is to load a .drv video driver  (really a 16 bit
>DLL) to allow access to hardware accelerated 3D functions for a variety of
>video cards for DJGPP developers.

16-bit DLL? I'd have thought it's 32-bit under Lose95.

>I've chosen this route because of the lack of documentation on most SVGA+
>hardware, and the wide variety of implimentations of SVGA functionality. 
>Using a Windows 95 .drv file will solve both of these problems, and since
>the manufacturers are responsible for writing the video drivers, they
>should be more efficient than one that somebody else wrote.  Who else
>could write a better driver for a video card than the manufacturer of the
>video card itself?

Ah, that depends. Many VESA drivers are buggy, and in that case
SciTech, the people behind UniVBE/SDD, writes better drivers. Very few
Windows drivers are bug-free either.

>Does anybody want to help me with this project?

Whatever. I don't think I have time to devote myself to such a
project, but I think I can contribute (I know a lot about these
things, and have enough reference material). Email me if you wish.

On a side note, I've recently begun a decompiler project of my own in
DJGPP. It reads either a DOS EXE, a 16-bit NE EXE/DLL, or a 32-bit PE
EXE/DLL file (more formats can easily be added) into memory, etc,
relocated, with exported symbols added, and ready for my code
analysis. I'm sure you could get working loader and exe file format
code from there if you want. though my goal with this particular
project is more complex - I want to generate C code from it. That's
right, I want to feed it any EXE file and it'll spit out C source
code. So far, it may be somewhat messy, but it looks promising; it
recognizes basic constructs such as "if", "while" (and Pascal "for" in
a bit hacked way), and just that is enough to make any disassembly
more readable.

Maybe someone would like to help me with that, also? (Even just
writing a user interface for it would be useful.)