On Thu, 14 May 1998, Derek Fawcus wrote:

> On Wed, May 13, 1998 at 06:10:31PM -0400, Michael Callahan wrote:
> > BTW, I recommend _Systems Programming for Windows 95_ by Walter Oney and
> > _Unauthorized Windows 95_ by Andrew Schulman.  The former is more
> > immediately useful in doing VxD programming, but the latter gives a better
> > overview of why Windows 95 is the way it is.
> 
>   Already got them.  Plus a few others including the two Nutshell books on
> Win95 and NT filesystems.  There's a bit of overlap,  but between them they
> seem to cover everything.

Ha!  In the windows world, nothing covers everything!

> > For building, you need the Windows 95 DDK (which means an MSDN subscription)
> > and DJGPP.
>   I've got the DDK,  but I've not looked at djgpp in years.  I guess thats
> just for the DOS extender?  If so I should be able to cross compile from
> Linux (I think the readme said you were doing that?),  and simply link/run
> with some of the stuff from djgpp?

Yes, I did all Venus development on Linux and cross-compiled.

>   As an aside:  from what I gather of the gross structure,  apart from the
> lack of memory mapped files in DPMI tasks,  this will probably all run on
> win 3.1/wfw 3.11.

IIRC win3.1 is out of the question: the IFSMGR didn't appear until 3.11.

3.11: I'm not sure, but skeptical.   IFSMGR was undocumented and in God
knows what odd state, and I'm not sure in what state in-kernel networking
was, either.

Btw, MMAP.VXD doesn't actually do mmap'ing of files: it just allows a
process to have a flat memory address space in which it can allocate pages
whereever it likes.  The DPMI services in W95 don't let you do this: you
can ask for a memory block, but you have no control over the linear
address at which it appears.  To support RVM, it must be possible to
allocate memory blocks at the same location in multiple runs of the
program.

Michael