Guide for compiling VirtualBox 4.3 and 5.2

[blueclouds8666]

I have recently been investigating how to compile VirtualBox versions 4.3.12 and 5.2.34 on Windows, only to realize that the documentation is very incomplete and that many issues will prevent you from doing it successfully. It took me a long time, but i eventually got it working. Given the unnecessary and tedious complexities, i thought it was a good idea to document my findings and share them with the rest of you, so it is humanly possible to compile these two versions. I have published the necessary tools, libraries and instructions on my website so you can grab them conveniently from there.

http://neonfloppy.sytes.net/resources/compiling/

[Ryan]

Interesting there aren't any pre-compiled Windows builds. Have you considered forking 4.3 or 5.2 yourself?
My biggest complaint with VirtualBox is more of an Oracle complaint: the system integrity checks are simply brutal. VirtualBox cannot launch a guest on my Windows 7 system if icons or branding resources are altered (imageres, shell32, basebrd). There's pretty similar issues on Vista with Extended Kernel as well, provided you can get past installation. Even Java 8 installers seem to snub my systems. Fortunately, there's OpenJava without those shenanigans.

[blueclouds8666]

I might consider making changes and adding features to these versions in the future, but i haven't set anything yet.

The instructions i published were designed so the hardening feature is disabled in the final binaries, it's likely this solves the issues you and others with Vista Extended Kernel were having, though i didn't have time to test it myself.

[ArcticFoxie]

What directed you to 4.3.12 and 5.2.34, by chance?
I've been on XP "forever" and only within recent months have I migrated to Win10.
With that migration, I had to ditch my preferred VirtualBox version (4.3.28).
I'm currently running version 4.3.40 for no other reason than my 4.3.28 would not launch in Win10.
I went to the highest build in the 4.3 branch (4.3.40) and it launched.

So with that comes a curiousity - why 4.3.12 and 5.2.34?
Thanks in advance.

[blueclouds8666]

What directed you to 4.3.12 and 5.2.34, by chance?
I've been on XP "forever" and only within recent months have I migrated to Win10.
With that migration, I had to ditch my preferred VirtualBox version (4.3.28).
I'm currently running version 4.3.40 for no other reason than my 4.3.28 would not launch in Win10.
I went to the highest build in the 4.3 branch (4.3.40) and it launched.

So with that comes a curiousity - why 4.3.12 and 5.2.34?
Thanks in advance.

4.3.12 is the last version without hardening, as later versions introduced it, causing headaches and several compatibility issues. i also think the user interface and icons in this version were better designed.

5.2.34 is the last version in the 5.2 branch that i could get to compile without clueless errors about dependencies, it also happens to be the last version to have functional windows vista machine additions out of the box, as they changed some things with the drivers in later versions that cause problems. another big reason being that virtualbox 6.x changed many things to the worse: removed support for windows xp hosts, removed support for 3D acceleration under windows xp guests, removed support for hosts without hardware virtualization available, and a brand new user interface that doesn't improve on anything, among other things. 5.2 represents the last version previous to these downgrades.

I still use these two versions because, in my opinion, 6.0 and newer do not provide any significant improvement, while they removed and broke several features that were useful to the user. if they are not going to make it better, why bother updating it?