I think, iam going try windows xp on the first place. And then see which games couldnt work probably on XP.. Maybe there is nothing wrong to using winxp instead..
Win98SE would be struggeling to let a better AGP card working because of non support in drivers..(i really like to see a Pixel shader 3.0 working in this system) Also that 137GB drive limit isnt very hopefull..
win98se has also that 1GB memory bug..

My decissions will be made if windows xp would be a better candidate for my build or not.. i know that windows xp had also had a LBA-48 bug. But luckly it would be solved in SP1 / SP2.
What i really dont like is to mount a seperate SATA / IDE PCI controller, if known that the board also have controller ports, and actually needs to give up one PCI i really cant miss at all.

Does anybody knows if the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 LSR / FSR would have support of LBA-48 on there controllers?

Forget about the previously computer setups i haved mentioned.

My setup would like this:

It would still be socket 462 though.

AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (Thoroughbred-B, AXDA2600DKV3C) 266Mhz FSB. 2133Mhz ( why i choose this one, because it was the max for my older Soltek SL75KAV-X motherboard)
2X512MB (maybe 2x 256MB) PC3200 DDR400 ram.
For now an ASUS Geforce 4 TI 4x AGP 128MB (also thought on a Geforce FX card)
2x Voodoo 2 SLI *for glide only)
Creative SB LIVE 5.1 (skip it later for an other card) I had this card from on other old computer.
Iam guessing to go for 1 TB sata harddisk (installation WinXP only)
If iam go with dualboot windows 98se, that using a seperate 120GB harddisk for an single partition), but i hope to use an 250GB PATA instead for dual partitions of 125GB. )dont know if windows 98 se would split a 250GB harddisk up to two partitions.

Robin4 wrote:

I think, iam going try windows xp on the first place. And then see which games couldnt work probably on XP.. Maybe there is noth […]
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I think, iam going try windows xp on the first place. And then see which games couldnt work probably on XP.. Maybe there is nothing wrong to using winxp instead..
Win98SE would be struggeling to let a better AGP card working because of non support in drivers..(i really like to see a Pixel shader 3.0 working in this system) Also that 137GB drive limit isnt very hopefull..
win98se has also that 1GB memory bug..

My decissions will be made if windows xp would be a better candidate for my build or not.. i know that windows xp had also had a LBA-48 bug. But luckly it would be solved in SP1 / SP2.
What i really dont like is to mount a seperate SATA / IDE PCI controller, if known that the board also have controller ports, and actually needs to give up one PCI i really cant miss at all.

Does anybody knows if the MSI K7N2 Delta 2 LSR / FSR would have support of LBA-48 on there controllers?

Forget about the previously computer setups i haved mentioned.

My setup would like this:

It would still be socket 462 though.

AMD AthlonXP 2600+ (Thoroughbred-B, AXDA2600DKV3C) 266Mhz FSB. 2133Mhz ( why i choose this one, because it was the max for my older Soltek SL75KAV-X motherboard)
2X512MB (maybe 2x 256MB) PC3200 DDR400 ram.
For now an ASUS Geforce 4 TI 4x AGP 128MB (also thought on a Geforce FX card)
2x Voodoo 2 SLI *for glide only)
Creative SB LIVE 5.1 (skip it later for an other card) I had this card from on other old computer.
Iam guessing to go for 1 TB sata harddisk (installation WinXP only)
If iam go with dualboot windows 98se, that using a seperate 120GB harddisk for an single partition), but i hope to use an 250GB PATA instead for dual partitions of 125GB. )dont know if windows 98 se would split a 250GB harddisk up to two partitions.

With Windows XP I always try to get at least 1 gig of RAM in the system. Makes it all the more enjoyable imo.
I have used 512MB in the past (I think I even went lower) and it ran...but it wasn't particularly fast.

I red here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/303425-31 … indows-computer that windows me doesnt have that 137GB limitation:

You are correct..any version of 95/98/ME cant use hyperthreading..Win ME does not have the 137gb harddrive size limitation..98 does..Why not use an Athlon Cpu/mobo combo i agree,but on a money standpoint P4s and 478 motherboards are cheap and plenty and alot of AMD/athlon motherboards dont support legacy os' and are harder to find..I would recomend Socket A as an alternate to a P3 P4.

As for agp it all depend on the slot keys and agp voltage..Vid card wise i dont see any bad things about card selection..Pci would be easy but slower and most pci cards cost more because of the universal PCI easyness of slap it in everything and it works in a hurry.

One last thing..The Majority of ppl who do a build like whats be talk about here in this post are using games that were made for a P2 or P3 and simply want to get teh most out of those old games that they can get on the cheap..

Whats better, go for the clean install version (of windows ME) or getting the upgrade? What should be more stable?

Robin4 wrote:

I red here: […]
Show full quote

I red here:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/303425-31 … indows-computer that windows me doesnt have that 137GB limitation:

You are correct..any version of 95/98/ME cant use hyperthreading..Win ME does not have the 137gb harddrive size limitation..98 does..Why not use an Athlon Cpu/mobo combo i agree,but on a money standpoint P4s and 478 motherboards are cheap and plenty and alot of AMD/athlon motherboards dont support legacy os' and are harder to find..I would recomend Socket A as an alternate to a P3 P4.

As for agp it all depend on the slot keys and agp voltage..Vid card wise i dont see any bad things about card selection..Pci would be easy but slower and most pci cards cost more because of the universal PCI easyness of slap it in everything and it works in a hurry.

One last thing..The Majority of ppl who do a build like whats be talk about here in this post are using games that were made for a P2 or P3 and simply want to get teh most out of those old games that they can get on the cheap..

Whats better, go for the clean install version (of windows ME) or getting the upgrade? What should be more stable?

Ok, I read through the entire thread you linked in your last post, but I still don't understand what you mean with "upgrade". I suppose you mean the upgrade version of ME? If so, theres ways you can do a clean install with an upgrade disk but it might ask for an older disk in your optical drive during the install.

If you use ME, which language are you gonna be using? Dutch or English?

Yes i ment Windows ME `upgrade`.. I want to know which version is the most stable..
I think iam going to use the english version, because there are more patches and fixes for the english version..
Fixes are more difficult to find for the dutch version.

I also like the know how to get that OS stable as possible?? Which Service packs (official / not official) do i have to install?
Which other fixes could be highly recommended? I never had played with ME before.. So i really want to give it a go and see what happens..
So i litterly could have some help about those patches , service packs, and others have to installed so get windows ME working without much hassle..

Robin4 wrote:

Yes i ment Windows ME `upgrade`.. I want to know which version is the most stable.. I think iam going to use the english version […]
Show full quote

Yes i ment Windows ME `upgrade`.. I want to know which version is the most stable..
I think iam going to use the english version, because there are more patches and fixes for the english version..
Fixes are more difficult to find for the dutch version.

I also like the know how to get that OS stable as possible?? Which Service packs (official / not official) do i have to install?
Which other fixes could be highly recommended? I never had played with ME before.. So i really want to give it a go and see what happens..
So i litterly could have some help about those patches , service packs, and others have to installed so get windows ME working without much hassle..

It's kinda late here now, I have a ZIP disk or USB stick which I always use to quickly tweak ME on any new build. I also once did a Windows update with the Dutch Windows ME and have all the updates (or at least the updates that were available from Microsoft at the time) stored somewhere. Problem for me was to find a place to upload them where it doesn't get deleted after a while. I also have a copy (burned disk) and ISo of that Microsoft security disk, but I'm not sure if it has all the ME updates or only the security updates (but at least it has IE6 SP1 full in Dutch).
I even went as far as to create an (somewhat) unattended ME installation disk (you setup on a preformatted partition, basically you can walk away and after a while you're on your desktop) for which I used a downloaded MSBATCH.INF I have uploaded on Vogons once.

The thing is, I do remember never having used any of those downloaded ME updates, but you never know they might prove useful at some point in time, right? 😁

I do know there used to be many websites dealing with how to tweak ME to behave (one was to disable system restore and pc health and another one was a few extra lines of code in some of the system files, particularly for dealing with larger amounts of memory). Later on I just used one of the earlier English unofficial service packs and installed nothing, but I let it do all the tweaks for me.

If you give me some time, I'll look into this tomorrow, see what I can find 😀

Oke, I did some looking around and I think I found one of the pages I used to tweak my ME. It's here. It doesn't list everything but at least it lists most of the important ones.

One more thing: I don't remember ever having installed ME (or any 9x for that matter) on anything newer then a s370 Pentium 3, so I don't really know if that may cause extra trouble with ME (but it has gotten me curious as to if this is the case or not 🤣). I suppose installing ME on a newer system would make it more advisable to use an English ME and then to use the newest service pack (available on msfn.org). If that doesn't work (if it messes up your install) you can always reload (I made it easy for myself using the bootable unattended disk I created).

And one last thing: If you never ever installed ME before, why not try it first in a virtual machine so you can get the hang of it 😀

Sorry for the lengthy post, I think I spend about half an hour writing it 🤣

First post updated.

If you're going with 1GB of RAM (which will be needed if you want PS3.0 games), you should go with Windows XP. My understanding is that neither 98 nor ME will be out-of-the-box stable with >512MB for various reasons. I don't know if there are 3rd-party hacks/patches to correct or address that issue. By contrast, XP will install and start right up with 1GB of RAM. I personally always have found XP to be much more stable than 98SE (I have never owned an ME machine; have used them in the past with mixed results, but who knows how they were maintained).

Now about Shader 3.0 - that's GeForce 6800 or Radeon X1800 or higher (Radeon X800 doesn't support it). The GeForce 6800 isn't a perfect solution for Shader 3.0 either; it won't perform very well (if at all) trying to do things like HDR + AA at once. The 7800 fixes those problems, but there are few AGP boards available (7800GS comes to mind, if you can find one). However, before we get ahead of ourselves, consider what kinds of games actually require Shader 3.0 - most of them will not run on the AthlonXP (or will run terribly) because of its lack of SSE2/3, and generally low performance (relatively speaking that is). My advice would be to stick with the GeForce 4 Ti if you already have it, because it will handle DirectX 8 very well. GeForce FX will be an improvement in some respects, but not in all - go with the higher-tier FX cards if you go that route (5700/5800/5900). Radeon 9700/9800 or GeForce 6600/6800 would be much better choices if you want to play Shader 2.0 DirectX 9 games (like Half-Life 2 for example).

Finally, on the integrated audio - while integrated audio for *most* boards from the early 2000s wasn't great, if you have a Socket A board with an nForce and SoundStorm, the onboard audio can be pretty great. More from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundstorm The MSI you mentioned appears to have the hardware for this, and it'd probably be worth looking at unless you already have a nifty PCI card in the wings.

....

obobskivich wrote:

If you're going with 1GB of RAM (which will be needed if you want PS3.0 games), you should go with Windows XP. My understanding […]
Show full quote

If you're going with 1GB of RAM (which will be needed if you want PS3.0 games), you should go with Windows XP. My understanding is that neither 98 nor ME will be out-of-the-box stable with >512MB for various reasons. I don't know if there are 3rd-party hacks/patches to correct or address that issue. By contrast, XP will install and start right up with 1GB of RAM. I personally always have found XP to be much more stable than 98SE (I have never owned an ME machine; have used them in the past with mixed results, but who knows how they were maintained).

Now about Shader 3.0 - that's GeForce 6800 or Radeon X1800 or higher (Radeon X800 doesn't support it). The GeForce 6800 isn't a perfect solution for Shader 3.0 either; it won't perform very well (if at all) trying to do things like
at once. The 7800 fixes those problems, but there are few AGP boards available (7800GS comes to mind, if you can find one). However, before we get ahead of ourselves, consider what kinds of games actually require Shader 3.0 - most of them will not run on the AthlonXP (or will run terribly) because of its lack of SSE2/3, and generally low performance (relatively speaking that is). My advice would be to stick with the GeForce 4 Ti if you already have it, because it will handle DirectX 8 very well. GeForce FX will be an improvement in some respects, but not in all - go with the higher-tier FX cards if you go that route (5700/5800/5900). Radeon 9700/9800 or GeForce 6600/6800 would be much better choices if you want to play Shader 2.0 DirectX 9 games (like Half-Life 2 for example).

Finally, on the integrated audio - while integrated audio for *most* boards from the early 2000s wasn't great, if you have a Socket A board with an nForce and SoundStorm, the onboard audio can be pretty great. More from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundstorm The MSI you mentioned appears to have the hardware for this, and it'd probably be worth looking at unless you already have a nifty PCI card in the wings.

If i want also run windows xp then i think 1GB memory should be highly recommended!. I also think its stupid if you want to install XP SP1 only! You also missed the most important security fixes.. I know XP wouldnt be that secure either, because some those security problems arent fixed by the way.. But its more secured by running sp3. Without SP2 you also missed the LBA-48 harddisk size fix and some other fixes you really dont want to miss.. Iam also looked at the prices for the tualatin processors, but iam not going to pay 30 dollars for that stupid `cheap and oldest`processor that people arent using anymore do their internet tasks.
Socket A processors are much cheaper to get, only 9 euros (cheap as is an very big stock to buy on ebay or so) And its a better idea to get the almost latest period socket A system..
And socket a system is much easier to use watercooling if you want. (that watercooling is just to make the system more special) Rebuilding an Socket A system is nice only, but really nothing special / boring when using it only on air)

The first period socket A processors really gets though on running windows xp with all its updates!. And using more ram is always welcome on those machines... Because with more windows fixes and upgrade the system just consume more resources, specially memory..

Why i taking these parts? Because of there looks, onboard intergrated NIC, price of the components(and i want to do somthing special with it), sata on the board ect.(also keep in mind that every fixes and patches could slow down a slower version of socket A system). A first period socket A system would be slow as hell if everything is configured well.. For me Windows 98 / ME isnt the main operating system as needed.. But i should definitely run it if i have some compatible issues with older games that only run on windows 98 se / ME
I know the time of the OS between Win 98 se and WinXP isnt perfect either (me sucked and win2000 was more designed for company use), but i really want to make a compatible on both osses if this its possible (i know there are memory and harddisk size fixes for windows 98se.) ( if it could not out-of-the-box, then iam just looking for the middle way)
So if this would help me on my journey i will buy that software if that could solve the whole big problem here.. I really doesnt care about running faster games on that computer till half-life 2 period. I also have a S775 QX9650 system that can take the tasks of the faster games and better graphics support.. Why using 2 systems? Its just really hard to make one system that can do all..

1. If you want to run win98 se only. That shouldnt be a problem. But dual boot, you have to

Also why iam buying an 6800 GT / Ultra card instead of using GF4 TI or GF FX.. The best spot is the GF FX, but that wasnt the fastest serie graphics what nvidia had released that day.
GF4 TI is very nice, but need to care both system can use the same amount of memory and graphics card..

2. If you want to make a first period win xp box, you could get in problems that some win98se games wont run anymore (also used those tweaks)
3. If tou want to make a latest windows xp box, the system is already to slow ect ect.. So there if no perfect match here..

At my vision i do:

1 One system that can do the latest win98se period (if these games all run fine on xp, then i leave it that why, otherwise i need to make it win98se compatible too)

2. Second system that will to the latest windows xp period and the whole win 7 32-bit period (32-bit only machine)

1. The availability isnt so good.

2. GF4 TI cards where known of there bad GPU coolers. Most of them wherent really lived long. Good replacements are hard to find (most 3rd party cooler arent that high quality or just make more noises)

3. The noise of those GPU coolers (or the bearings went out, or design of the fan is just horrible.) These cooler always inflate with dust.

4. The prices what you pay now is just horrible..

5. I always can have a little bit more speed from the VGA card.

I really like the 6800 series better.

1. Its just faster then the previous nvidia series.
2. These cards are much easier the watercool (thats already in my plans. That i want to preform)
3. PS 3.0 is just a nice gimmick too.. ( i know back in the days playing RTCW on a 6800LE) ( i like this series very well, because it was the first cards with PS 3.0 support. and it was also the beste series back then)
4. HDR + AA i really dont care at all, GF4 TI didnt had also things that newer cards had) ( i also have another faster system here, so can dual boot both system to cover that whole period once)
5. I guess 7800GS doesnt seems to have offical windows 98 support ( if i want to use that graphics card on that os) And also my waterblock doesnt fitt on that card.)

So for my opinion the 6800 series would be a better deal for me.

Does any body knows whats the sweet spot of hard drive size running on windows xp (and which max does it support) Iam thinking of using an SATA 500GB harddisk to run Winxp SP3 on. And taking a 120GB drive IDE if i want to make the system dualbooting.

Sweet spot for XP for the HDD should be somewhere in the 250-300GB range.
Also,I just finished doing a Socket A rig too!Here are the specs:

ECS K7S6A (DDR333,that's a improvement to say,also it has a custom BIOS logo,which is Rammstein 😁)
AMD Athlon XP 2200+ downclocked to 1500+ (default by the BIOS)
Socket 370 stock Intel fan 🤣
1GB DDR400 RAM (2x 256MB sticks and 1x 512MB stick)
ATI Radeon 7000 32MB AGP
Realtek 8139D PCI NIC
8GB WDC Protege (primary XP drive atm)
10GB Seagate ST310211A (which will be my Windows 7 Lite primary drive)
TSSTCorp SH-S182D DVD-ROM
Delux ATX400w P4 PSU
Delux MT375 case

I am looking forward changing the video card though,as I like Aero,and I have enough RAM on it.

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more of a modern PC. But perhaps I'm just getting old feeling that an XP system is "pretty much a modern PC". Moving from a sub 1GHz Athlon to an Athlon XP totally changes what games this build will be suited to run. I get a feeling that it's the joy of building that is the primary focus of this system rather than any intent of playing specific games.

Decide which games you wanna play on a system. Figure out what hardware is needed to run those games in the best possible way, without needing to go overkill. Then you'll know what system you'll need to build.
Nothing wrong with building for the joy of building ofc, but this build is moving into "just another PC" territory rather than retro imho.

I wish you good luck all the same though 😀

LunarG wrote:

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more o […]
Show full quote

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more of a modern PC. But perhaps I'm just getting old feeling that an XP system is "pretty much a modern PC". Moving from a sub 1GHz Athlon to an Athlon XP totally changes what games this build will be suited to run. I get a feeling that it's the joy of building that is the primary focus of this system rather than any intent of playing specific games.

Decide which games you wanna play on a system. Figure out what hardware is needed to run those games in the best possible way, without needing to go overkill. Then you'll know what system you'll need to build.
Nothing wrong with building for the joy of building ofc, but this build is moving into "just another PC" territory rather than retro imho.

I wish you good luck all the same though 😀

There was an entire topic about what is retro and wat isn't and opinions differed.
Obviously what is retro tomorrow may not yet be retro today. But with the problem of modern rigs not being able to cope with DX9 games very well anymore, a good DX9 computer may soon be retro already.

But anyway, I could dig up that topic if you want, could be an interesting read for you?

I didn't mean to come across as offensive, it was just a continuing trend, that the build kept being upgraded and upgraded through the whole thread, until it isn't even the same "class" of system as it started out as. As I said, I have no problem with building for the joy of building. It's fun to play around with older hardware, and it's a good thing that people still see the value in the hardware that most people see see as obsolete.
I only intended to comment on what I saw as a slightly funny observation, not disrespect the OP. It it came across as such, then I do apologize.
I have also noticed while going to uni with people 10+ years younger than me, that what I remember as being "pretty recent" is to them "old as heck", so clearly people have different points of reference 😁

LunarG wrote:

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more o […]
Show full quote

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more of a modern PC. But perhaps I'm just getting old feeling that an XP system is "pretty much a modern PC". Moving from a sub 1GHz Athlon to an Athlon XP totally changes what games this build will be suited to run. I get a feeling that it's the joy of building that is the primary focus of this system rather than any intent of playing specific games.

Decide which games you wanna play on a system. Figure out what hardware is needed to run those games in the best possible way, without needing to go overkill. Then you'll know what system you'll need to build.
Nothing wrong with building for the joy of building ofc, but this build is moving into "just another PC" territory rather than retro imho.

I wish you good luck all the same though 😀

I really cant see why an socket 462 is `a modern pc` in your eyes.. Socket 462 is outdate few years ago. My main rig computer is a Intel 2500K sandy bridge, its a whole 64-bit machine. It cant run 16-bits software anymore.
Perhaps it could run 32-bit software. My main goal was to build the fastest win98 se machine. But i had to made some choices about the hardware.. Keep in mind that S478 boards and that period hardware isnt easy to find anymore.. Because people dont see any use in this stuff anymore.. They also know that there arent much people who will buy this period hardware. So they just toss it away, or give it to recycle centers.. The cleaning of this hardware goes really fast.. Look on second hand sites..I tried it in my neighborhood, but cant really find anything for a decent price. The pentium III tualatin would be the best bet. But if you know that those motherboards are very limited now, and havent much choice. So i thought about to go for the S462 FSB266 boards as first place.. But these boards are become rare as well.These board where also familiar with the bad capacitor plague.

I also had to mentioned that if you then looking for newer FSB 333 boards that these boards only have 5 pci slots in the new board designs. If i want to install:

1. Graphics card (in AGP slot) (some cards where already occupy two full slot brackets.
2. NIC card
3. 2X voodoo 2 SLI
4. PCI soundcard
5. Maybe a IDE / SATA controller card.

Then you might already come in trouble with expansion slots.. I wanted to use the Athlon XP 2600 + 266FSB because i had this processor bought already, but want to use it again in my new build.( i like in general)
I choose this processor because i dont wanted to use the palamino one, because these version can became very hot.. ( my brother had one back in the days, that one was very hard to cool down.)
And also AMD Socket A/462 thunderbird 1400mhz arent easy to find.. ( so next choice would be the palamino, but as i said these running to hot in my opinion)
This 2600+ was only a few euros. (and really can buy more for cheap if i want)

I also wanted to have a system like no slower then a Tualatin 1400mhz. because i dont want to come in problems because the system might be getting to slow after all.. (finding an 1400mhz thunderbird is not easy in 2014 anyways)
But my main problem was more because i dont want to spend to high prices on these old hardware.. So i bought just the parts i got them cheap as possible.. And its is not easy to find the parts that i need for lesser money. So i though about the problem of those almost overfilled pci slots. I thought, shouldnt it be easy to find a board with NIC intergrated.. So thats i went to these MSI K7N2 motherboards..
The other nice gimmick was that this was the first socket that was possible to watercool it.. I also could take the tualatin, but then you need a special maded board for it.. And these boards are hard to find now..

Now because iam in this position, iam thinking to make this system dual boot.. On one disk i want to install windows 98 se or ME (iam not sure about that), and second disk i thinking of using XP. But iam not out on this already to, because of the bugs thats still are in XP ( security issues)

The other benefit of the board i have chosen, its also having native SATA on board.. older board doesnt.. I prefer to using onboard solutions instead of seperate add-on cards that mosly doesnt work very great..
I know windows 98 doesnt support sata, but always can use it in legacy IDE mode, or using Win98 on IDE disk and using XP on sata disk.. And dont forget installing SP3 XP loads the system more heavily. So to compensate that, a faster system is more ideal.

With service packs I just orient myself according to dates and timelines. Same goes for driver versions and things like that.

SP3 is serious bloat and needs 4GB for many games to run properly.

Whereas with SP1 I had a P4 with 1 or 2 GB and that was enough.

Small drives isn't a problem IMO. Worst case put the 32GB limit on a current Seagate SATA and you're set.

If you study the driver releases it usually mentions game fixes. A driver that's releases 6 months to 1 year after a game should do the trick and you should have zero issues.

GOG.com games are DRM free, so you don't need to be online. I don't know what the deal is with Steam. Do you just need a good firewall and that's it, as long as you don't surf the internet?

I was also planned to using steam on that system. But i think i can forget that now, and probably i better can install it on the next system that would get next to this one. I was also planned to install XP on that faster system too, but i think i can leave it on windows 7 32-bit version now. On the other hand thinking of installed win98 se only on this system, but i know i can get in troubles trying running some winxp games on windows 7. Ill think that there are a lot games who whouldnt run actually or having compatibillity problems.

Do you guys are going online when updating drivers / windows? I dont have had any experience with making slipstream cds, so mostly iam a littlebit affraid that it just wouldnt work as i want. And i really dont know how it works too. If you saying that i need 4GB for running games on SP3, yeah then better leave it to SP2 only.

If i only need to online, that should be only for updating (large files), dont think i have a better way to do this..

Robin4 wrote:

I was also planned to using steam on that system. But i think i can forget that now, and probably i better can install it on the next system that would get next to this one. I was also planned to install XP on that faster system too, but i think i can leave it on windows 7 32-bit version now. On the other hand thinking of installed win98 se only on this system, but i know i can get in troubles trying running some winxp games on windows 7. Ill think that there are a lot games who whouldnt run actually or having compatibillity problems.

Do you guys are going online when updating drivers / windows? I dont have had any experience with making slipstream cds, so mostly iam a littlebit affraid that it just wouldnt work as i want. And i really dont know how it works too. If you saying that i need 4GB for running games on SP3, yeah then better leave it to SP2 only.

If i only need to online, that should be only for updating (large files), dont think i have a better way to do this..

I can tell you a little bit about slipstreaming and how I go about doing it.
I started out with just slipstreaming SP3 onto XP (this is really easy with NLite). Later I made several XP disks with SP3 and largely unattended (meaning most standard options like what timezone you live in are automatically entered). You can also make it use a product key automatically if you want it to (you still have to activate XP afterwards though).

If you use NLite (there are other slipstreaming programs but I haven't tried any of those yet) then it's supposed to be important that the host OS is the same OS as the OS you want to slipstream. So if I want to slipstream an XP disk, I use a computer that has XP on it.

This is kinda how it works (from top of my memory, I haven't slipstreamed in a while now).
I take some random XP disk I have (there are basically three of them, more if you count Royalty oem disks like Fujitsu Siemens) and copy all the files on the CDROM in one work directory. I also have the standalone XP SP3 (not the ISO one).
NLite reminds me a bit of msbatch98 btw.

There was a guide on msfn.org on using NLite, I'm not sure if it's still there anymore, but it's mostly a matter of selecting what you want it to do and NLite will do it for you.

After NLite has finished, I create a bootable ISO using the modified XP files in the work directory and then test the newly made ISO if it works using Virtual PC 2004 (I'm not sure if VPC 2007 will work on XP so I used 2004 instead). If it doesn't work, then at least you didn't burn a CDROM for nothing.

I did figure out that the more different things you let NLite do, the bigger the chance that something messes up, that's why I very much recommend you first use VPC to test your new ISO as this will save you time, CDROMs and frustration in the long run.

...

LunarG wrote:

With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more o […]
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With each update to this thread, it appears as though this system is becoming less and less of a retro build and more and more of a modern PC. But perhaps I'm just getting old feeling that an XP system is "pretty much a modern PC". Moving from a sub 1GHz Athlon to an Athlon XP totally changes what games this build will be suited to run. I get a feeling that it's the joy of building that is the primary focus of this system rather than any intent of playing specific games.

Decide which games you wanna play on a system. Figure out what hardware is needed to run those games in the best possible way, without needing to go overkill. Then you'll know what system you'll need to build.
Nothing wrong with building for the joy of building ofc, but this build is moving into "just another PC" territory rather than retro imho.

I wish you good luck all the same though 😀

IT IS! XP can't run a ton of games. at least 98 has DOS games with kernel ex some XP app computability. 98 also unofficial video drivers and stability patches for over 512mb of ram. hell install 256mb and install and dual boot OSes long enough to patch them and then install 1gb of ram. 😊 😎

kithylin wrote:

Robin4 wrote:

I really cant see why an socket 462 is `a modern pc` in your eyes.. Socket 462 is outdate few years ago. My main rig computer is a Intel 2500K sandy bridge, its a whole 64-bit machine. It cant run 16-bits software anymore.
Perhaps it could run 32-bit software.

I know this is probably off-topic but I just wanted to comment that sandy bridge chips -CAN- run some limited 16-bit software, it's the operating system that you have on it that is the limiting factor. Windows 7 (or windows 8 ) 64-bit, can only run 64-bit and 32-bit coded software. -HOWEVER- if you were to install windows 7 (I don't know about 8?) 32-bit version, you could then run some old 16-bit programs. My source for this: I own a sandy-bridge based laptop, and since it only has 3 GB ram on it, I chose to load it with Win7 32-bit. And I popped in a CD-ROM with some old windows 3.11 pinball game, and it installed, and ran and played just fine. No problems, other than the "system test" suite crashed on running, but I just installed it without running the test program and then the game runs just fine.

So, these chips can run 16-bit code just fine.

What we need is a VM software that supports full 3d acceleration for 98. it could even make some money. even cooler if supported all the things the the video cards mention the VOGONS wiki do/have.