Hi, yes, I had similar issues once. When running Windows 9x on a CF card, the system behaved jerky.
Changing the DMA option for HDDs in device manager helped a bit..
I guess the root of the issue is that the CF card wasn't meade for multitasking, ie.e. reading and writing simultanously.

Anyway, maybe another CF card model might behave better (an industrial type, maybe ?). Or try an SD card instead.
Android/iOS devices use them now, so SD card makers do take this use case (SD card as an SSD replacement) more into account.

If you like best performance, maybe using a recent 64 to 128GB SATA SSD will help.
There are SATA-ATA converters out there. Some do even work. 😉

Or you could try to use a DOM, Disk-On-Module.

That being said, these are just some ideas. I merely use the CF card/9x combo in Thin Clients currently.
In DOS or Windows 3.1x I almost never had issues with CF cards..

PS: Also take care of alignment when using modern HDDs or Flash disks. FAT32 isn't quite ideal for this.
See SSD in a Vintage Computer

You can try to use SDFormatter v4 to format flash media and see if this improves disk performance.
Unlike Windows/DOS, it knows how to properly format SD cards (and thus, maybe CF cards, too).

Edit: small edit.

Jo22 wrote:

Hi, yes, I had similar issues once. When running Windows 9x on a CF card, the system behaved jerky.
Changing the DMA option for HDDs in device manager helped a bit..
I guess the root of the issue is that the CF card wasn't meade for multitasking, ie.e. reading and writing simultanously.

I'm not experiencing issues when in Windows/multitasking. All the issues are in pure DOS mode and, as far as I can tell, only when trying to save to files. It doesn't happen every time I try to save (like, I can copy files to the drive easily and without problems using Dos Navigator).

At this point considering the cost of CF vs SDF, even though SSD adapters are more expensive, I am starting to consider them for the next build But for now I will try to keep getting this to run. There has to be a way.

Funnily enough: maybe it is the CF card, I have a Libretto 50CT with a 2GB CF as hard drive, and with the same games, this does not happen. I had not thought of that until just now. Will have to see what is up.

Hoping more people reply to this and see if there's a pattern. This is definitely the biggest CF I have ever used as an HD on nay device ever.

I had this problem while trying to use a CF card as well. I ended up giving up and using a 1GB Disk On Module for that system instead. Pretty much any writing activity would fail if it didn't have the option to retry. It usually worked on the second try if the software had the option.

Does the 2GB CF in your Libretto show the same problem if it's in the PC you're having issues with?

Error 0x7CF wrote:

Does the 2GB CF in your Libretto show the same problem if it's in the PC you're having issues with?

Good idea, I should try that, as long as I don't boot into Windows (don't wanna mess with the drivers, setting up that Libretto was a nightmare), it should be OK!

Another thing I noticed: the Windows 98 logo does not show up at boot, I briefly see some garble on screen. After messing with some of the settings (transfer mode, DMA mode) I managed to make it show, but duke nukem's config program still refuses to save.

Windows seems to work absolutely fine, I am using it and writing this from that machine actually.