Back in the day, "not supported" didn't mean "deliberately blocked." There's a chance you can install the WinME driver, either as-is or with a couple edits to the .inf file, but no guarantee you won't run into problems.

Technically you don't need the chipset drivers at all; Win98 has generic ones built in, but you won't necessarily be able to extract 100% of performance out of the system on those. (In the case of VIA or ALI chipsets you definitely want the native drivers, not sure about ATI.)

Since you already ordered the board, give it a try & let us know how it works. 😀

The only way to find out, is to download ME drivers and install Win98.

ATI made chipsets...? Huh, TIL.

Jorpho did 98SE on that board recently.
Re: P4 Win98 suggestions

I also show up in searches for P4R800-VM, but I don't think I put 98SE on it, just collected notes for the possiblity.

Fantastic news, thank you all for the help! 😀

Just for reference and info for anyone who may come across this...

This board is a nightmare with Windows 9x I've literally spent all day trying to get it working nicely with 3 complete windows installs and loads of messing around. My older Aopen board worked flawlessly out of the box.

In short, avoid this board/chipset for Windows 9x even using ME drivers... it's bad! Might have to revert back to my older board tomorrow but games are so much smoother (when this setup actually works) so I'm trying hard still. 🙁

Hope it helps someone someday.

What kind of trouble were you having? Maybe try installing ME and see if you get the same issues. It could be a fault with the board itself rather than an incompatibility with 98 itself.

Yes, details please.

Funny enough I had trouble I couldn't track with this board on XP, and put it aside for later poking.

There's more than a little noise online about dud 7600gs. I went through my own hair-pulling trying to get rid of in-game artifacts on my P4R800-VM. Tried better powersupplies, config changes, physical and software reinstalls, older driver, memtests, yada-yada. Eventually tried the card and RAM in a P4P800SE and no problem. Happy ever since. The card just wouldn't work right with the P4R800-VM and I have no explanation for it.

The issues i ran into and some i still have but have made some work arounds are:

CD drives not being detected by games or applications even though my computer shows the disk is present, this also happened after Windows 98 did the initial HDD format. I would get a message like the disk wasn't even there Retry, Abort, etc. A reboot and restart of setup would solve this as the drive was formatted previously. Ultimately i solved it completely by just running 1 drive not 2. The master/slave jumpers were fine the IDE cable was plugged in correctly and it's a known good cable. This exact setup and cable ran flawlessly on my previous board so it's definitely a strange thing going on with the board but just using the one drive works.

I also have had major issues with Sound Blaster Live! The board simply refuses to install Sound Blaster 16 emulation whereas again, my previous board has no issues what so ever. When you try to do so it will BSOD. I've tried multiple PCI slots and the PnP settings in the BIOS but nothing works. I still don't have this but i can live without it as I'm more of a Windows gamer than DOS aside for DOOM, Wolf 3D and Duke 3D all of which have modern alternatives which i use in Linux.

Installing the SM bus driver made boot up a lot slower for some reason but performance elsewhere seems fine. The chipset drivers also were a nightmare as they said the chipset wasn't present when it clearly was... same for the LAN I had to install that manually without using setup.

Games at on the previous install would do all sorts of strange things like no FMV or not work at all for no reason. Seems to work now though in this install.

All in all it's just very buggy, i've got it going now after a lot of messing around but i swear is a sneeze toward it, it will go crazy again. This is all on Windows 98 SE I've not tried XP but if it's anything like my experience in windows 98... steer clear of this board/chipset.

That said, when it does perform it performs VERY well... Especially in games my 3D mark scores are much much higher on this board than my previous one.

Thanks.

The ATI Radeon 9100 IGP - ATI IXP200 chipset of this board is a little unusual. Here's a handful of period reports to save anyone else some search time.

ATI Radeon 9100 IGP Chipset Preview
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/radeon/ati-rade … 00-chipset.html
Review: ATI’s Radeon 9100 IGP
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/54498-r … radeon-9100-igp
ATI RADEON 9100 IGP Chipset Preview
https://hothardware.com/reviews/ati-radeon-91 … chipset-preview
ATI Gives Chipsets a Try - Introducing the Radeon IGP
https://www.anandtech.com/show/888

And maybe interesting. Basic new-product review for the P4R800-V. I found no P4R800-VM reviews.
https://web.archive.org/web/20040603221157/ht … ocs.cfm?aid=510

Mostly I was doing a big search to see I could find anything new about drivers this time. Basically, no.

It's easy to find people complaining about the board, but it's always easy to find people complaining, and particularly during the happy-electrolyte years. Adjusting for that. I notice a lot of people had RAM compatiblity complaints. With cheap RAM and with expensive RAM. Some insisting they needed single-sided.

EDIT
IIRC, IPX250 is the full feature set, IPX200 has no Wake On LAN/Mouse, IPX150 has no ethernet. P4R800-VM manual says has Wake On LAN/Mouse, but a correction was published later.

I saw that in the manual about the board only accepting single sided RAM modules. Luckily I bought a pair of good brand DDR400 single sided modules of only 512MB capacity so no issues for me. I also always run memtest86+ on any second hand memory I buy and it did 5 passes with not a single error.

I don't really recall ATI doing many other chipsets back in the day other than this one and some Xpress type chipset on socket 775? (if memory serves correctly.) I recall the drivers being near impossible to find. I think ATI tried their hand at chipsets but frankly they suck for a number of reasons.

As mentioned previously though... if you can coax a board into life gaming on this chipset seems to perform very well indeed. I've been playing F22 Lightning 3 and a few other games today for most of the day at crazy high frame rates and no issues what so ever. It out performs my previous Aopen board (SIS chipset) by a long, long way.

That said, for your sanity, avoid this board/chipset.

EDIT
IIRC, IPX250 is the full feature set, IPX200 has no Wake On LAN/Mouse, IPX150 has no ethernet. P4R800-VM manual says has Wake On LAN/Mouse, but a correction was published later.

Yes I can confirm my P4R800-VM does not have Wake On LAN/Mouse. There is a BIOS update out there but given how touchy this board is and how well i've managed to get it to run now I'm not going to go down that road. The notes only mention support for new CPU's and my 2.8Ghz P4 is way overkill already but it might be an option for someone else if they are stuck with this board/chipset. Might have a few bug fixes? Who knows.

I suggest you image your HD now that you have it running well. Something like Acronis or other good Disk Imager and put that image on a second HD (and maybe even burn to CD/DVD) that way you can always quickly put it back running if something messes up the OS.

Horun wrote on 2019-12-29, 00:32:

I suggest you image your HD now that you have it running well. Something like Acronis or other good Disk Imager and put that image on a second HD (and maybe even burn to CD/DVD) that way you can always quickly put it back running if something messes up the OS.

That's actually a very good suggestion which i will do tomorrow. I actually overlooked that, thank you.

darkomen wrote on 2019-12-29, 00:28:

I don't really recall ATI doing many other chipsets back in the day other than this one and some Xpress type chipset on socket 775? (if memory serves correctly.) I recall the drivers being near impossible to find. I think ATI tried their hand at chipsets but frankly they suck for a number of reasons.

"Funny that you should mention that" Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ATI_chipsets

I've used ATI RS482 on Asus ABAE-LE. Notes here somewhere.. HP Pavillion a1310n with AMD 64 3700+. Retired by bad caps but was a real trooper for three consecutive owners. Onboard video was reviewed to be roughly equivalent to a lesser FX5200. I checked that with XP, notes say Flatout at defaults was okay on asphalt and choppy on dirt. UT2K4 on defaults and bumped up to 1024x768 was completely smooth in Team-DM on Tokara Forest.