Support for Windows 7 on future drivers?
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Hello! Big thanks for all the work being done first of all.
Just a quick question: I noticed in the Shibari installation guide, no support for Windows 7. Is this gonna be definitive for all future "common user" drivers/tools you develop? Or could it be supported too in the future as development continues?My main PC is Windows 10, no problems there, but I do have a separate machine on Windows 7 (a CRT-TV setup using crt_emudriver), which I'm currently in the fence about upgrading it to 8.1.
Thanks.
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Heya,
Shibari itself is a .NET application and can run on Windows 7 just fine. The core issue in the current constellation is the FireShock (v2) USB driver; I've written it using technology not available in Windows 7 because Microsoft didn't backport it.
It depends; with ViGEm I'd like to go for Windows 7 support as long as possible because in kernel-land I don't really need any newer fancy features for now but for USB drivers the newer OS'es are really attractive to developers because writing a user-land driver is much faster, safer and easier to test.
The upcoming new Bluetooth support for Shibari will be a 100% Windows 7 compatible though. USB I currently have droppen in priority because I need to jump less between projects mentally or nothing will get finished
TL;DR: I personally want to aim for Windows 7 compatibility whenever it is easily achievable for now.
Cheers
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Makes sense. Thanks for the response, and again, thanks for all the work being done. I've been following (and depended on) your projects since ScpToolkit's first release. As always, I'll be looking forward to future releases. Cheers!
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Is it worth aiming for Win7, considering it reaches end of extended support (= dead product) in January?
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Well, you gotta look at it from multiple angles. I try to avoid depending on latest and greatest features if they're not an absolute necessity and don't really wanna dictate the OS version users have to have. On the other end though the toolset and overall quality of the Windows Device Driver ecosystem is very compelling with the current releases of Windows 10 so I don't know, we should keep an eye on Microsoft's plans and if they manage to go "all Windows 10" (for a certain percentage ofc.) then I'll most probably follow.
FireShock v2 (the "Shibari edition") was actually my first driver utilizing UMDFv2 and I was amazed how fast I became in prototyping simply because one major factor was eliminated; a programming error doesn't result in an instant system crash. Also no need for strict signing because it's not kernel code.
TL;DR: we shall see
