VMMouse for NT 3.x: QEMU/VMware mouse integration driver | Hacker News Reader

VMMouse for NT 3.x: QEMU/VMware mouse integration driver

github.com

54 pointskiyouta13 comments

There is a Cambrian explosion of such drivers lately, IMO one of the better LLM applications.

oh yes, the author is on a streak: https://github.com/ages2001?tab=repositories

I really like seeing that, I’m big into retro stuff, especially from that era

I see little point in running those old systems on bare modern metal, but having a working VirtIO stack could be very interesting indeed (I’m „vibing” one for OSX systems starting with Tiger). One could use old applications or develop new ones for old systems, but have things like filesystem snapshots, networking, etc managed by a modern system.

Exactly! This is the only place I like using LLMs, making old stuff work again, breathing new life into it. Containing it so it doesn't create security issues.

Now I'm getting my hopes up of someone porting OSX Tiger to Apple Silicon natively . . .

Why can't _you_ prompt your favorite LLM to do it?

Holy crap, that's awesome!

Wait.. how are these the same author?

$ claude

> write me a USB driver for Windows NT. qemu is at /usr/bin/qemu-system-i386 and a local NT installation is at nt.img

* Doing Something...

Things are getting crazy. I could pretty much just start with ReactOS at this point and just pull up an LLM every time my hardware did not work or an app did not run. Within a week, I would have an Open Source windows that did everything I personally needed it to do.

Has anyone done that when Linux is so hackable?

Why is this needed? As far as I recall, mouse works just fine in VMWare in all 3.x NT versions.

Probably for smoothly transitioning from the border of the VM to the host, and back?

Mouse "works" but it will require that the VM "capture" the mouse pointer and often doesn't move the same way it would on the host because the VM is having to translate the messages it's receiving from the host OS in to emulation of a classic PS/2 mouse.

A VM integration driver allows the host to just pass through to the guest the absolute position of the pointer over the virtualized display and the button/scroll events which allows it to not need to be captured and movement feels natural to the host system.

Newer guest OSes that support USB HID can generally support an absolute input mode which was intended for drawing tablets and it'll work well enough, but it's a bit of a hack and requires updating the USB descriptor any time the display resolution changes to keep them in sync so a VM integration driver is still nice to have.

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