Get involved
How to contribute
The ways to help Velocity Drivers, from a hardware survey or test report to lending a machine through remote help or sending code.
Windows 9x drivers are written against real hardware, and there is far more of it than any one developer owns. Most of what Velocity9x runs on today came from someone testing their own machine. Here is how to help, from a five-minute job to a longer loan.
1. Test a release on your card
Install the current release on a machine you can recover (Installation), run something, and report what happened, good or bad. A first run on a card marked Recognised, untested is especially valuable: it is the only way that card moves up the list. See Hardware testing and bug reports for what to send.
2. Send a hardware survey
If your card is not supported, V9XSURV.EXE collects what a new backend needs: the PCI identifiers and configuration space, the video BIOS, the VESA mode list, your monitor’s EDID and the VGA registers. It reads and does not write. New families, the GMA 3100 and the Radeon HD 5570 among them, were built from surveys. How to run it.
3. Lend a machine through remote help
The fastest way to get a new card working is to let the developer work on it directly. The V9x Remote Agent is a small program for Windows 95, 98, Me or 2000 that, when you switch on remote help, lets the developer run programs, see the screen and restart the machine over the Internet, while you stay in control: every command is signed on the developer’s own PC, and you can pause or switch it off from the tray at any time.
The test bench video shows the setup this plugs into. Many of the cards in the hardware database, from the GMA 900 and HD 4000 to the Radeon HD 7660D and R7E, were brought up this way. How to enable remote help.
4. Share screenshots and benchmark numbers
Screenshots of games running, and benchmark results with the exact settings, make the games and benchmarks pages better. For Half-Life, use the project’s standard mwd5 timedemo: Half-Life 1.1.1.0, timedemo mwd5 three times, report the best of the three and keep all three results. Always say the card, machine, driver version, resolution and renderer. Post them in an issue on the Velocity9x tracker.
5. Send code or documentation
Velocity9x is GPL-3.0-or-later and built with Open Watcom v2 and the Windows 98 DDK; see Driver development. Fixes to documentation and this website are welcome too. Keep to the project’s rule: never claim a capability that has not been measured on hardware.