I would check if DMA modes are enabled for any of the drives. Look in device manager for each drive.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

When I play games on my recently installed W98 PC, all disk based games take ages to load. What seems to happen is I click on th […]
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When I play games on my recently installed W98 PC, all disk based games take ages to load. What seems to happen is I click on the desktop icon, the cd drive spins up, the splash screen appears, screen goes black, CD drive goes quiet and then a 10 minute wait for the logos or intro video to start (accompanied by the CD spinning up again). This happens for games like Driver, Streets of Sim City, Kingpin... the thing is I've tried two DVD drives - a 2006 Emprex drive and a 1999 drive (not sure what make) and it does it on both. Both will load up the contents of CD and install games just fine, it's just playing them. This hasn't happened on my other W98 builds.

Any ideas?

Slot A MSI-6191
Athlon 800MHz
256MB SDR RAM100
2005/6 80GB IDE HDD
PCI Voodoo 3 2000
SB Live
Fresh W98SE install + drivers

Did you change your disk controllers to use UDMA/DMA instead of PIO mode? Wasn't that a thing back in the Win98 days?

DMA status cannot turn a couple of seconds thing into a 10' thing. Unless the 10 minutes mentioned is an exaggeration of course.

It was an exaggeration - a genuine 5 minute wait is what normally happens.

One other thing - when I say the screen goes black, the cursor is still on the there as a sand timer, and it moves and is responsive.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

It was an exaggeration - a genuine 5 minute wait is what normally happens.

One other thing - when I say the screen goes black, the cursor is still on the there as a sand timer, and it moves and is responsive. When I see

Right-click "My Computer", go to "Properties", then the "Performance" tab and see if any/all drives are in "MS-DOS Compatibility Mode". It was a common issue when people would upgrade DOS 6.x/Win3.x to Win9x, they'd have their CD-ROM driver in CONFIG.SYS and that prevented the 32-bit driver from being installed by Win9x.