Another good reason to support independent internet archives

Why share something which you can sell for exorbitant prices? /s

Anybody who still has MSDN Library CDs from the 90s, archive them at archive.org NOW!

Also of note Valve's Proton only goes back to DX8. Versions prior to that were considered not worth it.

I mean that's just a bad assumption no matter how anyone looks at it - if you created an array for 8 devices then just stop adding to it when you reach 8. The "a user will never have more than 8 gamepads" is a bad assumption because the logical question then is "what if they do" and the answer even back in the day would have been "the game will crash" which isn't how any code should be written. Stop processing at 8 if you are so sure there will never be more than 8, but have the most basic sanity checks.

I chuckled at the callout to Rust9x. Neat to see it pop up randomly.

The author linked to the repo and the code is at https://github.com/seritools/castrol-honda-dinput-fix/blob/m...

Seems pretty straightforward. They hook DirectInputCreateA() and pass their own device enumeration wrapper with the offending flag removed.

> am I right in thinking the DirectX library only exports a single function and _everything_ else is through DX interfaces

Yup! That's why I didn't have to create a gazillion passthrough functions.

The original DLL in my modern Windows installation has these 8 exports:

    DirectInputCreateA
    DirectInputCreateEx
    DirectInputCreateW
    DllCanUnloadNow
    DllGetClassObject
    DllRegisterServer
    DllUnregisterServer

The game only calls DirectInputCreateA, and the rest happens via the COM object that that function creates.

You can run Windows 95 in DOSBox. You could also just run WINE which runs most old games.

You can use WineD3D for Windows.

Usually dgVoodoo handles most of the games (that don't have actual bugs like this game) fairly well.

Otherwise, 86Box is a pretty good full-system emulator for everything up to the early 3D era.

As for DRM, there's various ways around it of course :)

Because I felt like it :) Also works for multiple versions/patchlevels.

But yeah, with the info provided it should be patchable. It's a `push esi` though, where esi has to stay 0 for a few further usages, so it's a bit more than a one-byte patch. It also wouldn't fully resolve the OOB write in the rare case where you _do_ have 9+ game controllers connected.

I feel like this is a cleaner solution. As a user you don't have to faff around running a whole application just to change 3 bytes. Just drop this file in and go.