Modern Generic SVGA driver for Windows 3.1

One of the problems here is that this uses quite a lot of the MS source code and I'm not sure of the license & legality of it. This was in an era where MS used to release part of the actual source code of Windows for OEMs to adapt, but as there was a special deal for each particular OEM, it is not very clear what the actual licensing & redistributing terms are if you didn't had such a deal. Most probably, this is violating MS copyrights, even if the source code is easily available on the web these days.

I already had to drop a customer project like this a decade or so ago (just because of this uncertainty) so it's not entirely a moot issue.

It is a shame that SciTech Display Doctor / UniVBE was never opene sourced. It probably contains a lot of wisdom and info to get all those special modes and probably would of been helpful for quirks and such that documentation lacks and only a concrete implementation would of found.

On a side note, the PowerVR-Series1[0] released their source code for their GPU but stated that

> As of right now, due to licensing concerns we have been unable to supply some libraries and headers provided by SciTech Software for "The Universal VESA VBE"

I wonder if there has been efforts by this community, such if anybody has a connection to SciTech / Kendall Bennett / or finding out if IBM had source code releasing rights for that part of the operating system when they made it the native driver to OS/2.

[0] https://github.com/powervr-graphics/PowerVR-Series1

I'm curious about this exact sort of thing in regards to windows 98 and how hard it would be to support DirectX given that 3D support code is visible in Mesa3D for reference. But, then again... I'm one of the loonies that likes to see how far one can push an old operating system on new hardware.

mentioned the other day (as the road not taken) in

One Dog vs. the Windows 3.1 Graphics Stack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42594024 (92 comments)

Very amazing work indeed!