Elia1995 wrote:

Does it also come with "actual DOS" drivers aswell other than Win9x ?

Yes, IIRC it's similar to SB PCI cards and requires a TSR, EMM386, and perhaps NMI.

Your machine does not have proper win98 drivers and is not DOS compatible - I would give up in the idea. If you want to build a fast win98 machine, get one of the following:

For Athlon 64 CPUs: - Socket 939/754 motherboard with VIA K8T800 OR ULi M1689 OR nForce 3
For Intel Pentium 4 CPUs - Socket 478 - any mainboard - for LGA775 only get the intel i865 or VIA P4M800 chipsets
For AMD Athlon XP - VIA chipsets are preferred (KT880 is my personal favorite) but you can go with the more common nForce 2 boards.

Win98 compatible 939/754 boards are harder to find and a bit expensive. The easiest way to go is probably LGA 775 -> people seem to throw away AGP LGA775 boards so you shroud be able to buy one + LGA p4 cpu really cheap. Just make sure it has the intel i865 chipset. Good socket A stuff is getting more and more expensive and decent working socket 478 boards are pretty hard to find for a good price.

If you want to experiment with the "absolute fastest win98 machine" basically anything will do as long as it has PS/2 ports and you pick a video card and PCI sound card with windows 98 drivers. Just the other day I installed win98 on my socket AM3 Athlon II X4 after disabling 3 cores in bios as well as the on board video and sound cards. I used a PCI-E Radeon X850 for video and a Yamaha YMF-724 PCI for sound - and it worked surprisingly well!

Have you tried to use VDMSound on Windows?

When I had my Athlon @1Ghz, it allowed me to play almost any DOS game with sound, and I don't remember that the sound lagged.

kanecvr wrote:

Your machine does not have proper win98 drivers and is not DOS compatible - I would give up in the idea. If you want to build a […]
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Your machine does not have proper win98 drivers and is not DOS compatible - I would give up in the idea. If you want to build a fast win98 machine, get one of the following:

For Athlon 64 CPUs: - Socket 939/754 motherboard with VIA K8T800 OR ULi M1689 OR nForce 3
For Intel Pentium 4 CPUs - Socket 478 - any mainboard - for LGA775 only get the intel i865 or VIA P4M800 chipsets
For AMD Athlon XP - VIA chipsets are preferred (KT880 is my personal favorite) but you can go with the more common nForce 2 boards.

Win98 compatible 939/754 boards are harder to find and a bit expensive. The easiest way to go is probably LGA 775 -> people seem to throw away AGP LGA775 boards so you shroud be able to buy one + LGA p4 cpu really cheap. Just make sure it has the intel i865 chipset. Good socket A stuff is getting more and more expensive and decent working socket 478 boards are pretty hard to find for a good price.

If you want to experiment with the "absolute fastest win98 machine" basically anything will do as long as it has PS/2 ports and you pick a video card and PCI sound card with windows 98 drivers. Just the other day I installed win98 on my socket AM3 Athlon II X4 after disabling 3 cores in bios as well as the on board video and sound cards. I used a PCI-E Radeon X850 for video and a Yamaha YMF-724 PCI for sound - and it worked surprisingly well!

For socket LGA775 P4 the OP can go with ASUS P5P800-VM, it's pretty cheap, at least in my country i managed to buy one factory new(box sealed) for US$30,00 and the P4 3.0 775 not factory new but in a mint condition i spent US$2.
This setup with 512MB Ddr400 and Diamond Monster Sound MX300 should work great on Windows 98 SE
The video card range its pretty wide so it should be easy to find some suitable card.

Elia1995 wrote:

That's the problem !!! I can't find any driver compatible with Windows 98 and that motherboard !!! 😢
That motherboard (ASUS A8V-XE)'s audio chipset is a SoundMAX, if you'd like to try to search some compatible drivers for Windows 98, I can't find any 😢

You may try these ftp://www.retronn.de/driver/Soundmax/SoundMax_3.0.zip
From a look at the driver folders there are WDM drivers that run win Win98SE.

I think it would be best to build a PC dedicated to Windows 98se, I see parts arent too expensive in Italy http://www.ebay.it/itm/Placa-Base-Shuttle-AV4 … qIAAOSwQYZWyXou

PS Not my item.

elianda wrote:

Elia1995 wrote:

That's the problem !!! I can't find any driver compatible with Windows 98 and that motherboard !!! 😢
That motherboard (ASUS A8V-XE)'s audio chipset is a SoundMAX, if you'd like to try to search some compatible drivers for Windows 98, I can't find any 😢

You may try these ftp://www.retronn.de/driver/Soundmax/SoundMax_3.0.zip
From a look at the driver folders there are WDM drivers that run win Win98SE.

I'll give a try to these drivers and see what happens, still without a Win98 compatible graphics card (The X300 Sapphire doesn't have Win98 drivers), there's not much I can do on Win98 being stuck at 16 colors when most games require at least 256 colors.

Anyway I am moving the Windows 98 project on another computer I put together yesterday, it even has an ISA slot and I got my CT3670 in there, DOS works flawless and anything is smooth (Intel Celeron 1,10 GHz CPU), I'll scan the hardware with SpeedSys and Everest today and see if I find Win98 drivers for that chipset...

Have you tryed these drivers:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/archive/radeonaiw-98me

look at the release notes, x300 is Supported by this driver.

I have newer cards, x600 and x850, and both work under win98.

Sammy wrote:

Have you tryed these drivers: […]
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Have you tryed these drivers:

http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/archive/radeonaiw-98me

look at the release notes, x300 is Supported by this driver.

I have newer cards, x600 and x850, and both work under win98.

Thanks, I'll try them a bit installing Windows 98 in dual boot with XP, if they work, I'll then delete XP.

EDIT: I got the graphics card to work with those drivers, although I can't get the sound to work.
I tried those SoundMAX drivers someone suggested but, even though they install without problems, the audio doesn't work.
Are there some other "generic" drivers I can try ?

I don't think so....

Can you post device and vendor id of the unkon audio device ?
(Hardware Manager)

Can you set someting in Bios for the Sound ?
eg switch between HD-Audio and AC97 ?
or some legacy sound emulation ?

Why not run your game under XP with VDMsound ?

Today I finally found my good ol' PCI 128 Sound Blaster CT4750, but I couldn't do anything because I needed to download the drivers, now I got the drivers and I'll go try it as soon as I can.
Since I found actually Windows 98 drivers for it, I think and hope it will be working fine... well, fingers crossed until then !!!
(Meanwhile I played some Heretic II without sounds, I got nostalgic by how smooth it looks... 🤣 )