Very old drivers for windows 98

[jtsiomb]

On a whim I decided to try to use one of my serial 6dof devices on a windows 98 retro-pc, but I can't seem to find old-enough drivers anywhere. The oldest driver in the 3dconnexion website is for windows XP. Is there a chance to unearth and make available older drivers? And old versions of the SDKs too would be nice. I'd rather use my Magellan Spacemouse Plus, but I also have a Spaceball 4000 FLX, so finding drivers for any one of those would be great.

[ngomes]

Digital palaeontology except some of the dinosaurs (me, jwick) still roam around.

I will see what I can find.

[ngomes]

A first search didn't find any old drivers but see if this post helps.

[jwick]

The question is whether I can find a floppy drive.

[ngomes]

The question is whether I can find a floppy drive.

Or a tape drive. One without a blown vacuum tube.

[jtsiomb]

A first search didn't find any old drivers but see if this post helps.

About spacemice.org? I looked and didn't see any old drivers there, but I already asked Tehrasha about it through email the other day, and got a reply today that he probably has disc images and he needs to look through them. So that sounds promising.

[jwick]

Here is a SpaceWare 9 driver from the Labtec days.
It appears to support SB 2003, 3003, and 4000. RS-232 only.

Let us know if it works.

[jtsiomb]

Oh that's great! I didn't check back and missed your answer. Indeed that driver works nicely!

https://imgur.com/a/VEZOWOB

Is there by any chance an SDK of the same vintage to go with it? (or any version of the SDK that will work on win98 and that driver)

[jwick]

I didn't find a vintage SDK.
You could try a recent SDK. I've tried to not make incompatible additions.

[ngomes]

We have SDK version 1.1.2 in the internal archive. That's the release from early 2005, not exactly "vintage".

Using a recent SDK is unlikely to work with very old devices.

[jtsiomb]

Thanks! That's worth a try, 1.1.2 from 2005 was much earlier than what I could find so far. Is there a link you can give me for that SDK?

[ngomes]

Is there a link you can give me for that SDK?

We cannot publicly post a link to old SDKs as they are no longer fit for purpose but we have sent you a download link by private message (PM).

[jtsiomb]

Thanks! Appreciate it.

[jtsiomb]

Perfect, it works great thanks: https://imgur.com/M32it3F

I ended up full circle to not actually using the SDK in the end, but I did at first, and it was very helpful to make sure everything works.

In the end I decided to skip the dependency and LoadLibrary("siappdll.dll")/GetProcAddress all the relevant entry points instead, because I eventually want to use this code to implement spaceball stupport for windows in freeglut, and a hard dependency to a proprietary 3rd party library would be unacceptable. I tested this code compiled with MSVC 6 on win98 with the old drivers from this thread, and with MSVC 2022 on windows 11 with the latest drivers, both in 32bit and 64bit modes, and it works across the board, so I'm happy with this solution.

Is there any danger of not shipping siappdll.dll with future windows drivers?

[jwick]

Is there any danger of not shipping siappdll.dll with future windows drivers?

Not shipping that would break a LOT of apps.