Looking at the discs, the EtherLink III driver appears to have already moved to WDM (elnk3.sys instead of .vxd) even in "first edition" Windows 98.

The Cirrus Logic 542x drivers stayed as VXD, however, there is no guarantee they would still be compatible with Win95. I guess you could try overwriting cirrus.vxd, cirrus.dll, and cirrus.drv with the Windows 98 versions if you wanted to see. I didn't see any BSWAP or XADD insructions in them in a quick check via objdump.

I vaguely recall claims that installing DirectX would update video drivers, but looking at the DX5 package on the OSR2.5 CD, I don't see any drivers. Anyone know the backstory there?

Note that both the Cirrus 542x and 3Com EtherLink III predate Windows 95, and were both ubiquitous both during Windows 95 development, and during the window (pun) of development between the original release and OSR2.5. If there were any fixes they needed, they would've made it into OSR2.5. By then, both of these were old in the tooth, and I can't imagine the priority for 98 was anything other than don't break them.

Thanks.
Regarding DX5: the latest driver for Cirrus GD are in the DX6.1 package.

What drivers are you talking about? Some of them have problems, its because of VXD vs WDM i think.
I have no problems to install ATi Rage Pro drivers with Win95B to WinME, havent tested orig Win95A.

Oh I am sorry. Double post as I alread posted this question earlier this year. Sorry

Topic 107431

I thought about SB16, GD5434, 3c515, MPU401, 1542C etc.

So at the end I understand it’s about a) identical driver model and b) testing 😀

Anyway thanks and sorry for the double posting

WDM is >Win98 only, VXD is same model as Win95 so might work. However the devices you're mentioning there are all old enough there should be mature Win95 drivers for them. 'Newer' is only better if the updates are relevant and useful. In quite a few cases (think: Via 4-in-1, nVidia Detonator) newer drivers than needed will add bloat and harm performance and you actively want older ones more suited to your hardware. Sometimes functionality is also deprecated in newer drivers, particularly relating to supporting older hard and software.

What exactly do you hope to be getting with say MPU-401 (a very basic serial protocol...) in a newer driver that would not already be present in the oldest stable driver in Win95?

Fully agree with what you said. The MPU was really a bad example and yes newest not always means better / faster

It’s indeed not that easy (for me) as most drivers of win98 (same in w95) are stored in their internal driver library and not availablevia simple .inf files to update driver. Most closely solution is the 1:1 file replacement