VOGONS Driver Library

[ProfessorProfessorson]

Prof, chill, I'm trying to think of an alternative! Festive season is keeping me pretty busy. I'm just slotting in dev time where possible at the moment.

I'll hopefully have an alternative anti-spam solution by the end of the weekend.

Ahh well, not so much my problem as it is yours, so not sure why you're suggesting I "chill".... Just letting you know he wasn't the only one with the problem. I have drivers to share, just post when the problems are fixed and I will try again later when I have time.

[SquallStrife]

Perhaps there's a cultural/language barrier here, but the wording you used earlier suggested I was deliberately making it difficult for you, like I don't want your contributions or something.

I sincerely want everyone to be able to make their contributions, large and small, so hang tight!

And I apologise if that's not what you meant. Technical stuff I'm good at, dealing with people is not my strong point!

[WolverineDK]

SquallStrife: just because I sighed in my last post. Then it does not mean I do not want to help since I do want to help I just asked for the FTP info, since as you know. I do have a kick ass connection , when it comes to up and down loading

[SquallStrife]

Nah, not you Wolverine, I think I'm just having a misunderstanding of what Prof was saying. Reading too much into it perhaps.

I'm toying with a simple username/password session system rather than the captcha system. But I won't get to do any serious work on it till Monday.

[TheMAN]

I agree that not everyone should be able to upload, more to avoid 100 drivers for the same device, 50 of those being the same version anyway.

Just thinking out loud but could we use a thread say "new driver finds" post a short description with a tempory link on rapidshare or similar.

Once 1 or 2 people with the same device confirm it is what its sposed to be & works then it can be uploaded to vogandrivers.com.

Its more complicated but we seem to be a good group here with dedicated people with a real interest in keeping old hardware alive. I sadly dont have much old hardware to test drivers but happy to help in anyway I can either this idea or others. in the end its SquallStrife & other more long term members call

+1

if everyone has the ability to upload, it's just going to turn into an epic disaster drivershq became... there will be broken drivers, mislabeled drivers, incomplete drivers, duplicates through mislabeling, etc

while I agree that everyone should contribute, a better way must exist to ensure quality of the uploads and to prevent the spread of viruses

perhaps a moderation system must be setup in place... upload files but it goes into a moderation queue that must be hand checked to ensure quality... it is hard to do it automated because there's no way to program the system to know whether it is a complete driver or not for example

perhaps an even better idea is to require a login system to prevent spamming too... recaptcha only does so much and fails to make uploaders be held accountable

[DonutKing]

I've seen other communities with 'spinoff' sites actually require you to have an account on the main site, and you have a unique number you put in a field on your profile. So when you sign up for the drivers site you don't need a password, you just need to use the same username, and provide a link to your Vogons profile with that unique number in it somewhere. This way you can automatically require a minimum of say 50 posts or something here before you can upload to the drivers site, and its also a way to ensure that you are only editing your own uploads too - by scraping their profile page here on Vogons.

Not sure if this is going to be easier to code or manage than a simple username and password system, just thought I'd throw it out there as an alternative
Of course if you plan to one day expand this beyond the Vogons community the user/pass system is a much better option.


Either way - don't worry too much about the login situation as it stands now. Squall is working on something, just bear in mind that he has a family and it is christmas time and he's doing this for nothing but goodwill

[sliderider]

If there is going to be a dedicated drivers download site then it has to be made clear up front what constitutes a "driver" and what does not to protect from any potential legal hassles. Just because something is included on a "driver" CD/DVD, or came packed in the box with a piece of hardware, does not necessarily mean it is free to distribute. A lot of hardware came with things that were/are still under copyright protection, so anything that would fit in that category would have to be stripped out of any CD/DVD image prior to uploading.

[elianda]

If there is going to be a dedicated drivers download site then it has to be made clear up front what constitutes a "driver" and what does not to protect from any potential legal hassles. Just because something is included on a "driver" CD/DVD, or came packed in the box with a piece of hardware, does not necessarily mean it is free to distribute. A lot of hardware came with things that were/are still under copyright protection, so anything that would fit in that category would have to be stripped out of any CD/DVD image prior to uploading.

Maybe national laws differ here, but the driver is also under copyright. So the distinction between driver and utilities (or whatever) in terms of copyright is meaningless. Just because everyone can download a driver from the manufacturers site it does not mean you are allowed to put it up on a third party website without permission.
This make archiving old software/drivers always a legal risk, since copyright timeframes are so long that every possibility to recover the stuff has long been gone (after 70? years if not refreshed (EU)). The only solution I see is to put such archives legally to scientific research, since copyright handling there is different.

[SquallStrife]

2011-12-19
- You are now required to log in to upload files, and reCAPTCHA has been removed.
-- I have created accounts for anybody who has uploaded files so far, PM me for the passwords.
-- There is currently no interface to create accounts, I'd like to discuss further how to moderate the system before I implement that.
-- If you have a driver to contribute but don't have an account, leave a note in this thread, and I or one of the people with accounts should be able to help.
-- Your username and password are transmitted by SSL. However, since this is shared hosting and not dedicated, the URL appears differently for the HTTPS portion of the exchange. The HTTPS URL will begin with https://secure6.mylha.com/~ybkxdrnm It is the same site, no viruses or anything, just that having a dedicated IP doubles the price of the hosting!
-- You will need cookies enabled to make use of this function.
-- As always, let me know if there are issues.

- Fixed a bug where the file size wasn't being detected in some instances.

[sebaz_ri]

I have a few drivers from old cards that i want to upload, but i don't have any account

[SquallStrife]

How big are the files you have? Perhaps you could email them to me for now?

[RoyBatty]

I have quite a few CD's again I would like to contribute. Graphics Cards, Sound Cards, Motherboards, Game Controllers...

[sliderider]

If there is going to be a dedicated drivers download site then it has to be made clear up front what constitutes a "driver" and what does not to protect from any potential legal hassles. Just because something is included on a "driver" CD/DVD, or came packed in the box with a piece of hardware, does not necessarily mean it is free to distribute. A lot of hardware came with things that were/are still under copyright protection, so anything that would fit in that category would have to be stripped out of any CD/DVD image prior to uploading.

Maybe national laws differ here, but the driver is also under copyright. So the distinction between driver and utilities (or whatever) in terms of copyright is meaningless. Just because everyone can download a driver from the manufacturers site it does not mean you are allowed to put it up on a third party website without permission.
This make archiving old software/drivers always a legal risk, since copyright timeframes are so long that every possibility to recover the stuff has long been gone (after 70? years if not refreshed (EU)). The only solution I see is to put such archives legally to scientific research, since copyright handling there is different.

Drivers are covered but manufacturers rarely enforce their copyrights on those. It would generate a lot of ill will with the public if they did. There was one company that made Nubus video cards for Macs a long time ago called RasterOps that did enforce their copyright on their drivers. When they stopped making video cards they continued to update their drivers for a while, but the only way you could legally get them was directly from them and they were charging $75 (to cover the cost of development in the absence of new video card sales to pay for it presumably). They had nothing to lose because they were already out of the video card business so they weren't too concerned about losing customers but their video cards were still in use by a lot of people so they (the customers) didn't have much choice. Buying a new video card for a Mac back then was an expensive proposition that could run over $1000 if you needed one with Quickdraw acceleration and DSP's for Photoshop. If you were running a render farm using multiple cards then the expense of replacing everything would be astronomical, so $75 for a new driver that fixed bugs and improved performance could be a bargain. Still, a lot of people hated them for charging for driver updates after they had already spent a ton of money on the card(s).

[sebaz_ri]

It's preferrable to have an account

[DonutKing]

I don't suppose anybody has a Win98 driver for the Vortex Advantage AU8810 sound card? I've tried a couple that I've found on google but they don't seem to work.

[ProfessorProfessorson]

I don't suppose anybody has a Win98 driver for the Vortex Advantage AU8810 sound card? I've tried a couple that I've found on google but they don't seem to work.

You could try hunting down driver releases for the following:

Absolute Outrageous 3D Sound Lite
I/O Magic MagicWaveV1 A3D PCI
Aureal Vortex Advantage PCI
Aureal Vortex SuperQuad 1500
Hi-Val PCI A3D Advantage


A driver set to one of those should work, as all those cards used the AU8810 I believe. You can look around on here and see if they have what you need:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/kirben/drivers.html

[DonutKing]

A driver set to one of those should work, as all those cards used the AU8810 I believe. You can look around on here and see if they have what you need:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/kirben/drivers.html

yeah I found that site with google, but it doesn't host any drivers directly, it links to some Russian site which in turn links to a whole heap of FTP sites... and pretty much all the links there are broken


EDIT: I've managed to find some drivers but none of them worked. They always hard freeze during installation, when windows detects the 'Aureal Vortex PCI Audio' device. On rebbot it says in device manager that they caused the computer to stop responding so Windows will never try to start the device again.


I've fiddled with BIOS settings, tried different PCI slots, fiddled with ACPI and PnP options, disabled all my parallel/serial ports etc, edited the drivier INI file to disable bus detection and all DOS support - even reinstalled Windows 98 and tried the unofficial service pack, still no go. I've even got a second identical card and it does the exact same thing. Motherboard is Abit BX6 rev2.0, latest BIOS, 256MB SDRAM, Leadtek Winfast S320 II (Nidia TNT2)


I've given up on it I think. I'll just stick a sound blaster 16 in there!

I'll upload the files I found to the drivers site, maybe someone else will find them useful one day.

[elianda]

Please add a possibility to enter details description with a fixed width font. There are a lot readmes in old driver archives that have text mode tables. This usually gets unreadable if I copy this to the details field. Oh an using the code tag seems to ignore CR/LF, so it gets even more unreadable .

[DonutKing]

Hmmm, now it won't let me upload a ZIP file? says invalid driver file extension

[SquallStrife]

I just tested it and it seemed fine.

Is there anything odd about the file name? Extra dots in it or something?

Could you copy+paste the entire filename here, maybe? Would help to debug it.