Yes, it is possible to trap only specific VBE subfunctions and emulate them some way. But one need to know GPU in detailed to reimplement it or if there'se no HW equivalent functionality in GPU it would needed to be SW emulated - very slow. Then it's better to tell the application that function is not supported to don't use it if possible (this is how simply Falcosoft did it).

About using Linux source code, Intel and AMD moved to fully open source drivers long time about.

There were some changes in the last 2 years.
I read that previous trash Nouvea driver for Geforce 9xx and 10xx is now good overall performance in 3D which is still great, average FPS are good, but is stuttering, its 10 month old report, but nowest, which i found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comment … ver_perfomance/
Im usually looking for Phoronix tests, found only old test:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/nouveau-kepler-2021/2 - Kepler test, finally patches to get not boot, but 3D clocks when its needed - performance is like 30% to 80% ~60% on average what is quite too. Im not sure what real clock has card in Windows 9x, if 3D clocks are activated, or it runs in boot slimmer mode.
i have found is from the 2019, where performance is abysmal: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019/2
I searched more and only found out that Nouvea project leader resigned in 2024 due classic Linux toxic environmental issues.
same for new Vulkan implementation: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvk-vulkan-performance/2
Also Nvidia released their own open source drivers for Linux, its better than be better, kernel part is open source and user space part its using there closed source firmware blob, some overview is here:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/nvidi … kernel-modules/
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-tran … kernel-modules/

Well its not simple like other devices drivers, because if on wrong gpu these drivers have like million lines of code and they are a lot of per game basis adjustment..

ruthan wrote on 2025-05-12, 17:37:

About using Linux source code, Intel and AMD moved to fully open source drivers long time about. […]
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About using Linux source code, Intel and AMD moved to fully open source drivers long time about.

There were some changes in the last 2 years.
I read that previous trash Nouvea driver for Geforce 9xx and 10xx is now good overall performance in 3D which is still great, average FPS are good, but is stuttering, its 10 month old report, but nowest, which i found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comment … ver_perfomance/
Im usually looking for Phoronix tests, found only old test:
https://www.phoronix.com/review/nouveau-kepler-2021/2 - Kepler test, finally patches to get not boot, but 3D clocks when its needed - performance is like 30% to 80% ~60% on average what is quite too. Im not sure what real clock has card in Windows 9x, if 3D clocks are activated, or it runs in boot slimmer mode.
i have found is from the 2019, where performance is abysmal: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nouveau-2019/2
I searched more and only found out that Nouvea project leader resigned in 2024 due classic Linux toxic environmental issues.
same for new Vulkan implementation: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvk-vulkan-performance/2
Also Nvidia released their own open source drivers for Linux, its better than be better, kernel part is open source and user space part its using there closed source firmware blob, some overview is here:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/nvidi … kernel-modules/
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-tran … kernel-modules/

Well its not simple like other devices drivers, because if on wrong gpu these drivers have like million lines of code and they are a lot of per game basis adjustment..

I heard about the new, open nVidia kernel drivers before. It's not useful for older cards.

I think at least Turing is required for those drivers, and the VGA BIOS on Turing has become too broken to be of any good use. Games like Titus the Fox would simply give a garbled text-mode screen (can exit with ESC however), suggesting a failure in some crucial VGA BIOS calls.

Nouveau's usefulness is limited. From my experience on newer cards (e.g. Fermi), resolutions with higher refresh rates (e.g. 120Hz) can only be attained with the proprietary driver. It may be useful for some older, pre-CUDA video cards, however.

It seems that olders card supported by Nvidia Open drivers is Geforce 1650 source https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules, but could argue that its very similar to 10xx cards, which are not far from 9xx. You dont need drivers for exact card to reuse a lot of source code to help you with development.

Nouveau driver are not great, but are still much better than start from the scratch and they seems to have much smaller code base, to start.

I hope that sooner or later will someone to 9x driver for modern cards, i could happen this year, or it could take 10 years we will see.

I think that even 2D drivers are too complex (compated to oss/alsa linux sound drivers) and it would take so many mandays to port it to win9x. Scitech did own drivers in the past but it didn't bring them profit for that effort so stopped it...