Legacy cards under Windows 7

[the_77x42]

I'm building a silent arcade PC based on a J1900 (BayTrail) CPU and a Radeon X600. Neither have fans, but the J1900 chipset doesn't support Windows XP and I'm aware the CRT Emudriver doesn't support X600 under Windows 7. I have a multisync arcade monitor, so the X600 would be perfect.

Is it possible to modify the Catalyst 9.3 (Vista/Win7) drivers to work with the X600 under Windows 7? What is the limitation of running legacy cards on Windows 7?

According to this PDF, the card should be supported on Windows 7.

Thanks.

[Zebidee]

Is it possible to modify the Catalyst 9.3 (Vista/Win7) drivers to work with the X600 under Windows 7?

As Calamity can't seem to work this out, I'd say your chances of doing it are pretty slim.

The way I see it, your choices going forward are:
1 - Persist with trying to get Windows XP or other old OS to work. Your biggest issue will be finding drivers to work with XP. You'd need to pre-roll your own XP install CD/USB and be sure to include drivers for your SATA hard drive or SSD or whatever as you won't get far at all without those. None of this will be easy, may take you days to get right and may ultimately disappoint you anyway, but here is where to start:

HOWTO create a fully updated XP x64 SP2 DVD - ryanvm.net
https://ryanvm.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=10623

2 - install Linux or DOS and use another MAME variant like AdvanceMame or whatever works with those OSes

3 - Buy a new video card

Cheers, Zeb

[the_77x42]

I suppose my post was more digging into the specific reasons why the drivers for those legacy cards cannot be modified for Windows 7. There are open source Radeon drivers available and there is a driver modding community. Are there specific limitations that make it impossible, or is Calamity just too busy?

[Zebidee]

I have no idea how busy Calamity is, probably has lots of things to do like most of us. You might try digging through the changelogs and the forum threads at around the time development focus moved from XP to Win7 environment. You might find that the question has already been answered.

[Calamity]

All drivers can be modified. It's just a matter of dedicating the little free time to what is really worth or makes sense.

Video card generations support a certain version of DirectX. Because Windows video handling is so deeply based on DirectX, this means video cards are somewhat tied to specific Windows versions.

The X series are DirectX 9 cards, this means Windows XP is their OS.

The HD 2000-3000-4000 series are DirectX 10 cards, so they'd be good for Vista, but Vista was a failed OS, so support was granted for 7. However, this support was never good.

The first generation with full Windows 7 support (DirectX 11) is the HD 5000.

Between XP and Vista there was a huge architectural change in video drivers from which consequences we're just starting to recover.

So probably there's a compatibility aimed driver (9.3) for 7 (Vista actually that works in 7 too) for the X600 that could be modded, but when we did the transition to 7 it seemed like a good idea to draw the line starting with the HD series only.