NamelessPlayer wrote:

In practice, having an ISA slot (with DMA support, of course; 875P/ICH5 and prior should allow that) means I can have a proper DOS sound card like an AWE32 installed, while the system is still old enough overall to support Win98SE usage (so long as you either install no more than 512 MB of RAM, or pay up the $21 for that RAM limitation patch).

$21 to edit the system.ini?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to … than-1-gib-ram/

NJRoadfan wrote:

$21 to edit the system.ini? […]
Show full quote

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Win98SE (so long as you either install no more than 512 MB of RAM, or pay up the $21 for that RAM limitation patch).

$21 to edit the system.ini?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to … than-1-gib-ram/

Tried those tricks with MaxFileCache and MaxPhysPage in system.ini already. They don't work with 2 GB of RAM + 256 MB of VRAM no matter how hard I try.

It's unstable to the point of not even booting up until I either downgrade it back to 512 MB of RAM...or install the demo version of that patch and watch it suddenly work fine with 2 GB of RAM, right until 10 minutes pass and the freeze/lockup that the demo version has kicks in.

Apparently, there's a limit around the 1152 MB mark for Win98SE before it has a page overflow problem and all hell breaks loose.

...Actually, this might also be a workable solution. Don't know how I missed that memory manager lurking the MSFT forums; most of the discussion there seems to concern that $21 rloew patch.

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Tried those tricks with MaxFileCache and MaxPhysPage in system.ini already. They don't work with 2 GB of RAM + 256 MB of VRAM no […]
Show full quote

NJRoadfan wrote:

$21 to edit the system.ini? […]
Show full quote

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Win98SE (so long as you either install no more than 512 MB of RAM, or pay up the $21 for that RAM limitation patch).

$21 to edit the system.ini?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to … than-1-gib-ram/

Tried those tricks with MaxFileCache and MaxPhysPage in system.ini already. They don't work with 2 GB of RAM + 256 MB of VRAM no matter how hard I try.

It's unstable to the point of not even booting up until I either downgrade it back to 512 MB of RAM...or install the demo version of that patch and watch it suddenly work fine with 2 GB of RAM, right until 10 minutes pass and the freeze/lockup that the demo version has kicks in.

Apparently, there's a limit around the 1152 MB mark for Win98SE before it has a page overflow problem and all hell breaks loose.

...Actually, this might also be a workable solution. Don't know how I missed that memory manager lurking the MSFT forums; most of the discussion there seems to concern that $21 rloew patch.

I suspect this issue is the reason why I was unable to install drivers for either my Ti4600 or my FX5900 Ultra (WinFast A350) on my dual boot setup. No matter, I wiped both installs and will now have a dedicated machine for Windows 98.

To me, at least, all those hours spent on planning for, acquiring and tinkering with (OK, not really the last two -- I was mostly just overthinking things) legacy hardware AND software have led me to this one single important conclusion:

CLOSED SOURCE SUCKS

Combine abominable phrases such as "proprietary" and "vendor lock-in" with troublesome words such as "legacy", "obsolete", "obscure" etc and now I am really wondering why so many people are still talking rather highly about various old (and current) players in the personal computing industry and their past acts AND their endless historical artifacts. Were it not for some platform-locked & proprietary hardware-dependent contents that actually have some timeless quality, I would already have abandoned all this madness for (a more common & mainstream kind of) reason!

But never mind me, just carry on you guys!

Open-source would at least make emulation a hell of a lot easier...on the other hand, we wouldn't need to emulate in the first place because people would just make source ports of whatever they want that will properly utilize the latest hardware.

I mean, if ASP/CSP and EMU8000 emulation were supported in DOSBox so that TFX and Eradicator respectively could sound their very best, there goes any incentive for me to deal with real AWE32 cards. Then there are all those Aureal A3D games from the Win9x generation that wrappers like ALchemy are useless for, since it turns out that A3D is its own API separate from DirectSound3D, and Creative now has it buried and unused after buying out the bankrupted remains of Aureal...

Speaking of which, if someone could make an OpenAL renderer that also had DirectSound3D wrapping, binaural HRTF mixing for headphone usage, and supported EAX 5 for those games that use it instead of the vendor-independent EFX reverb/chorus/occlusion effects, then I could do without Creative sound cards altogether! But of course, they won't let that happen if they can help it...

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Tried those tricks with MaxFileCache and MaxPhysPage in system.ini already. They don't work with 2 GB of RAM + 256 MB of VRAM no […]
Show full quote

NJRoadfan wrote:

$21 to edit the system.ini? […]
Show full quote

NamelessPlayer wrote:

Win98SE (so long as you either install no more than 512 MB of RAM, or pay up the $21 for that RAM limitation patch).

$21 to edit the system.ini?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/253912
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to … than-1-gib-ram/

Tried those tricks with MaxFileCache and MaxPhysPage in system.ini already. They don't work with 2 GB of RAM + 256 MB of VRAM no matter how hard I try.

It's unstable to the point of not even booting up until I either downgrade it back to 512 MB of RAM...or install the demo version of that patch and watch it suddenly work fine with 2 GB of RAM, right until 10 minutes pass and the freeze/lockup that the demo version has kicks in.

Apparently, there's a limit around the 1152 MB mark for Win98SE before it has a page overflow problem and all hell breaks loose.

...Actually, this might also be a workable solution. Don't know how I missed that memory manager lurking the MSFT forums; most of the discussion there seems to concern that $21 rloew patch.

Just to be sure: you can't use a gigantic RAM drive (like XMSDisk) to make all the excess RAM unavailable before starting Windows, can you? I read about that once long ago, but it doesn't seem to come up in discussions every much.

Jorpho wrote:

Just to be sure: you can't use a gigantic RAM drive (like XMSDisk) to make all the excess RAM unavailable before starting Windows, can you? I read about that once long ago, but it doesn't seem to come up in discussions every much.

The thought of RAM drives didn't really cross my mind, I have to admit.

It seemed like Win98SE would still need to address the extra RAM for the RAM disk to work, and I'd have the same issues again.

Well, XMSDisk is a DOS utility; I think the theory is that you can stick it in the autoexec.bat and Windows memory management subsequently will not come into play anymore than it would with himemx.sys, as mentioned in your link.

In theory, anyway. (Verily, the combination of Win9x and excess RAM is fraught with mystery.)