First post, by rishooty
Hi, this is only my second time posting. My first post was in regards to making an itx retro gaming build. With enough research I've found that VIA boards up to cn700/cn896 chipsets do in fact have drivers for windows 98: http://download.viatech.com/en/support/driversSelect.jsp. My specs:
minibox.com's m300 case
J7F2WE1G5S http://www.jetwaycomputer.com/J7F2.html
1.5Ghz C7 Cpu, single core(something like a weird pentium 4 or celeron clone?)
Soundblaster Audigy Platinum via pci riser
1GB ram
minibox.com picopsu, with more than enough power for this machine(it think 102w?)
Replaced the bios battery
UBCD98 + Unofficial SP3(tried 98se regular as well)
Despite the fact that google searches and msfn support the fact that cn700 chipset boards support 98, I've run into nothing but nonstop issues with them. I bricked my first one, which was an msi fuzzy 7199 cn700, because it was unbearably slow without a bios update(at least according to searches saying it's bios was buggy), couldn't find its update so tried whatever I could find the series of 7199. Basically, I had nothing to lose as it was a cheap board and it was unusable beforehand anyway.
With this one, it seems none of the cn700 drivers want to install or work properly. Either they crash mid installation, or they install and don't work correctly. Best example is I installed the cn700 graphics driver, and the screen supported no resolutions except 640x480 at 16-colors without getting a black screen. USB devices work, but they're buggy and sometimes need to be reinstalled for no reason. I can't even update the bios to possibly fix said issues because it claims that it doesn't match the board. The bios and device manager acknowledge the audigy platinum as "multimedia device" yet the driver installer claims it "can't detect the presence of an audigy card". It's almost as if, this isn't a j7f2 board, but the bios does in fact confirm it's a cn700 chipset.
Am I installing win98 or the drivers wrong? Are there any video or hardware related bios settings I should check? Should I just avoid the cheaper via based boards and just outright get a via? Just wanted to check here before I give up on my dream of a console sized retro gaming machine.
