Instead of necro'ing this thread, gonna make my own:

Resurrected my AOpen system with the AX63Pro board to see if I can diagnose what happened to it. Chipset is VIA VT82C693A Apollo Pro133. See sig for rest of specs.

Definitely was a lightning strike like I thought in 2018: both USB ports freeze the system and throw garbled alphanumeric symbols on the screen if you plug in anything whether in OS or BIOS; PCI slots 4 and 5 are dead; and the IDE controller is not always stable with anything plugged into the primary port. Done what I can for now by disabling the USB controller in BIOS, avoiding using those PCI slots, and using an FC-1307 1.4 SD-to-IDE adapter that for some reason is behaving best vs a HDD.

Just pretend none of that is an issue for the moment 😜 What I'm trying to do right now is just install the 4in1 drivers, specifically 4.25a. It was eons ago since I last did it successfully, and I remember there was some trickery involved. Just using the setup utility returns the same issue you see in the aforelinked thread:

• Fresh Win98SE install
• First login, install VIA 4in1 4.25a - it asks to reboot the system
• During new start of the system nothing pops up...

Which of course is indicative that no hardware / driver changes have been made. Confirmed as much by checking the device manager to see if any of the applicable drivers were changed, and nope - nada. Worse still, trying to reference to any of the .inf files that are decompressed - aside from the AGP driver, which kinda works - comes back with no compatible hardware drivers found, either via search for recommended or choosing yourself. Even that AGP driver is persnickety, as at first it looks for "viavxd.cat" which is nowhere to be found in either the decompressed files or those distributed to the system folder, but hitting cancel on that particular error prompt sends it on its way and still ultimately ends up installing the driver successfully. Even fixed an issue where 3DMark 99 MAX was crashing during the fourth test, and 3DMark 2001 SE crashing during the texture decompression routine of installation - though Descent 3 still crashes in D3D when idling on the animated main menu.

I've tried these drivers' setup utilities as well: 4.26, 4.35, 4.43. They all behave the same way.

Searching around Google pulled up some older threads regarding this issue as well, and it seems many just settled on using the working AGP drivers and letting Windows handle the rest on its own. That shouldn't be the end-all be-all of this, just cause VIA chipsets are weird. The drivers should work, they're designed for the system. What gives? Has anyone had success? I intend to toss the board and replace it with another, but I can't use a 440bx chipset for this particular system, as I need the AGP slot to run at 66MHz locked at all times - which means another VIA chipset is likely on the horizon. So I'd like to know how to get the 4in1 drivers to behave properly if at all possible.