I think your idea sounds great! It would have to be one of the fastest Win98SE boxes out there if you can make it all work. As an exercise in sheer brute Win98SE horsepower, I think it sounds really cool.

I'm surprised that your P4 3GHZ system with a V5 5500 doesn't run the Jane's sims well. I would have thought a system with those specs would run any old Jane's game flawlessly. What are your results with the 3GHZ CPU along with a V5 5550 when running those sims?

tincup wrote:

GPU EVGA 7900GTX 512mb: modded W9x drivers.

I'm currently rebuilding my Athlon 64 3400+ WinXP legacy system that you and I talked about previously. Since I also still use it as an HTPC system, I have chosen an AGP 7900GS as the graphics adapter. Now I'm wondering if I too can make this run under Win98SE. Can you shed some light on these modded drivers? Which cards do they support and where can they be downloaded from? Will they work on both AGP and PCI-E cards?

Note: This system has an ATI HDTV Wonder card in it. It won't work with Win9x. AFAIK, I'm stuck with WinXP or newer if I want to use this TV card.

Ill be able to shed more light on modded drivers after I get this thing together haha, All I know for now is that they' *should* work, that I've read that they do work, and I intend to find out. Part of the objective is simply to see what this 'moddedd W9x' thing is all about. Also, getting W98SE to load on a 200gb sata drive is an unknown to me, though I intend to pre-partition it into more friendly chunks.

The motherboard is what's kicked the project off really: mATX, early sata-ide/pcie-pci, and a complete set of W98SE-ME drivers. It's P4, so not in exotic territory making the project easy to step into.

Janes stuff run more than fine on the P4/V5 rocket - as powerful a native V5 system as I could reasonably make without recourse to a more exotic AMD based system. But I've noticed that in D3D mode some of these, like WW2 Fighters [or European Air War], thrive on extra horsepower [higher fps at higher resolutions in larger air engagements] and I'm curious to compare the two rig's performance.

There's also a big gap in the GPU profile of my collection - V5500/64mb to AMD 7870/2000mb. This needs filling and an up-gunned W98/Geforce 512mb rig is an interesting project. XP/4400+ would be natural, but XP doesn't bring anything new to the table, and I have it on hand in my main rig.

I've pencilled in a similar build with Win98SE, and an AGP Nvidia 7 series card. I'm not sure if drivers will work for WIn98SE (last official ones are for the 6 series), but I've read issues with unofficial drivers and cards having 512MB VRAM. It sounded like 256MB VRAM was the limit - this was a while ago though... Have things changed?

It's been discussed on Vogons though I can't find the most recent thread right now. This link offers some modded drivers to test:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/97786-geforce … e-by-zak/page-2

and this:
http://www.mdgx.com/files/nv8269.php

Regarding Vram - well, gonna find out!

tincup wrote:

It's been discussed on Vogons though I can't find the most recent thread right now. This link offers some modded drivers to test […]
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It's been discussed on Vogons though I can't find the most recent thread right now. This link offers some modded drivers to test:
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/97786-geforce … e-by-zak/page-2

and this:
http://www.mdgx.com/files/nv8269.php

Regarding Vram - well, gonna find out!

Alright, did a quick test with an AGP GeForce 7600 GS (256MB VRAM), on a 440BX mobo at AGP 2x, and managed to get the unofficial drivers working on Win98SE - plenty of blue screens along the way!

Ran a few tests: 3DMark2001 SE completed successfully, but with severe rendering artifacts. Also, tried a random and old DX game (Flanker 2), and that seemed to run fine with no artifacts... Eventually, took the card out because of the 7600 GS being slower than my 6800 GT, and of many blue screens when loading Win98SE. With some luck, the drivers maybe fine with older games and some careful tweaking...

Cool. As for me the parts are all together and looking good but I have to get a new socket 775 P4 [thought I had some...] so hopefully by next week I'll be ready to light it up and see what I can do. Configuring the drive now [Sata II 40gb instead of the 200 mentioned earlier] and cloning a fresh W98SE/sp2-3 from a backup image in preparation. My setup is PCIe/512mb so I'll have a whole bunch of different issues for sure - but the game is on!

Temporary delay as I 're-pot' the components into a different case. Clearance issue @ PCIe power plug mashing up against power cable exiting PSU. The diminutive but highly versatile Cooler Master 360 case is hamstrung with cards deeper than a Voodoo 5 if the power plug is located on the back of the card. I could source out a different PSU but prefer to use parts on hand. The ASUS V3 case is small but has a top mounted PSU so the conflict is avoided.

The Asus V3 case has a 1-piece front panel connector customized for whatever Asus motherboard it originally shipped with, so in most cases the header does not match a new motherboard's pin out. In the past I've modded the V3's 1-piece header to suite my new boards, but the MSI puts the wires in 2 'clumps' making it necessary to convert the Asus V3 wires to the conventional 1-pin and 2-pin KK header set up. I always need to re-figure out which wires are which leaving the front bezel, so, a further small delay.

Test fire planned for this evening.

EDIT: Another small delay. Test fire was a partial success - booted off an XP drive to make sure hardware was all working fine, but first attempt off the pre-configured W98 drive met with "Missing Operating System" error. Fussed a while to rule out bios settings [like IDE emulation mode for the sata setup] when it finally dawned on me that I'd partitioned/formatted/OS imaged the W98 drive using a W7 app - a really hit/miss proposition for FAT32 configs.

So, re-partitioned/formatted the drive off a boot disk fdisk, and this evening will restore the fresh W98 image using one of my other W98 rigs to avoid whatever the mbr/sys/??? problems were...

If I had a 512mb stick of DDR 2 I'd just fresh install, but lacking one I need to restore an iso image of a fresh install patched/configured to work with more ram.

No offence to anyone, but I never could understand why someone would want to put windows 98 on P4 3.2Ghz LGA 775 chip. That is just so far outside the normal range. That CPU and system would make a windows 7 box for anyone's grandma. If you want to build a windows 98 screamer go for a high end PIII something that was around at the time.

No offense taken! It's probably the same reason you try to cram a V8 Hemi into an Austin Healy? A fun technical challenge that costs you very little to try and zero life points if you fail, and puts all those spare parts doing nothing for you to work.

Add to that you can pop in an XP boot drive alongside the W98 drive [hint] - so it does double duty as a retro box?

And throw in a short list of games [mainly flight sims] that have always run happier under W9x but gobbled up whatever cpu/gpu horsepower could be thrown at them, especially with modern hi-res mods.

No this is mainly for the challenge. I already built a real fast P4-3.066/Voodoo 5 rig that does what's needed, but I'm drawn to try to bridge the chasm between the W9x/64mb graphhics world and the XP/W7/GB+ world.

Yet, after an evening of experimentation it's looking more and more like the 512mb/PCI-e card will not let W98 boot - but it's not like I wasn't warned! But we're still at it in the lab:)

A little update: with the help of the RLOEW ram patch [Rudolf Loew sells it $21] I now have W98se, 2gb pc4300 ram, AND a 512mb pci-e 7900gtx running in full color at native 1920x1200 resolution. Took some careful sequencing in the installation but for now I know that at least it's possible. I have yet to teak Windows and update with the unofficial SP, and *do* get the shutdown Protection Error right now, hut at this stage I'm hopeful it can all be worked out.

So, it looks like W98se can share digs with a decent spec XP setup.

So, how are these patches coming along? Are they worth it?

I'm thinking of a dual Win XP/ Win 98SE build around a GeeForce 7950GT AGP (256MB)... Will any of these patches help?

Worked out very well! The only sacrifice was I had to revert to an IDE drive for the W98se side of things to solve the shutdown protection error. If my motherboard bios permitted re-mapping sata drives to specific ide device IDs this would not have been necessary. There's another recent thread that covers this.

So far all game testing with the 7900gtx using the modded 7269 driver set has gone smoothly with no artifacts or weirdness to report. It is necessary to adjust the nVidia AA/AF settings as some games do not like them either set set too high or more than 'controlled by application'.

I bios dual boot to XP which is loaded on a sata drive and performs well under the P4-/3.60gz system. 2gb ram and a 512mb card are fine for any XP era retro games I'm likely to ever throw at it.

So the patch allows you to run either an aggressive standalone W98se setup, or simply allows you to run W98 alongside XP with no sacrifice to XP performance. Admittedly the patch is not a sure shot - your own configuration may not take to it as well, nor is it specifically designed to address GPU/vram issues per se - it just seems to have helped nudge a system on the verge of compatibility into working order.

I've been meaning to start a fresh thread to describe the process I used.

Very good news; a green light to experiment further in the future...

Have you tried running 3DMark2001 SE? When I tried a 7600 GS, on a stock install of Win 98SE and stock drivers, I was getting severe artifacts, though the game I tried worked fine.

No, but I just might. Will post results.

How are you getting on?

I've got some untweaked Win98 SE benchmarks for reference (not installed XP yet).

CPU: P4 3.2 GHz (Prescott) with 512MB
Mobo: Intel 875P chipset (Canterwood)
GPU: GeForce 7950GT 256MB AGP
OS: Win98 SE stock with Forceware 82.69 unofficial nVidia drivers

15340 score on 3DMark2001 SE

Ran without any glitches or artifacts this time. Score seems a bit low, but should be higher on XP.

After completing the build, installing XP/W98se & games, figuring out how to get the 7900GTX/512mb working with W98 [RLOWE patch routine described previously etc], and doing a basic 'shakedown', I stopped further work, i.e. no benchmarks yet. Real life... It runs cracking good though and now serves as my principal 'modern era' backup rig if the main W7 box goes down.