VOGONS


First post, by EriolGaurhoth

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I've been tinkering with getting Windows 98SE on a designed-for-XP laptop. My specs are as follows:

Model: Gateway 600YG2
Processor: Intel® Pentium 4™-M CPU 2.6 GHz
Ram: 256MB 266 MHz DDR-SDRAM
Graphics Controller: ATI Mobility Radeon 9500, 64MB of VRAM
Sound: Allegro ESS ES1988 chipset (SB compatible)
LCD Display: 15.7-inch active matrix (TFT) LCD color display
Hard drive: 128GB Serial-ATA driver
Disk Drive: 3.5" floppy and DVD+/RW
Ethernet: 10/100 Standard
Wifi: Broadcom BCM94306 IEEE802.11g network card
Expansion: 2 Type III PCMCIA Cardbus Slots, 2 USB 2.0, 1 Parallel, 1 Serial, 1 VGA, 1 S-Video
BIOS: Phoenix BIOS

I was able to find working drivers and test most every component, and they seem to be stable when running most basic programs as well as 2D games (tested: Age of Empires and Starcraft work fine). I installed 2 custom drivers, the ATI Omega drivers for the GPU as well as Broadcom Wifi Drivers from here: https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018 … windows-9x.html

My issue occurs when I'm running a 3D game, the game usually starts off fine and after a few minutes of playing it starts to stutter a bit, the game freezes, and then the entire laptop shuts down. No BSOD, no error message, no logging (that I can find), just a complete system shutdown.

I've done some troubleshooting that might give some hints on what is wrong, but it has been tough to nail down.

First it started with Monster Truck Madness 2. I ran the game with Direct 3D Hardware Acceleration on. I was using (at the time) DirectX 8.1. I fiddled with settings, turning on-and-off AGP features and still got the same crash. I then turned off DirectX hardware acceleration, ran it entirely in software rendering mode and it still crashed. I ran it again with DirectX 9.0c, and it still crashed.

I ran the same tests using Motocross Madness and got the same results.

Next I ran Unreal Tournament. I started with UT 1.0. When it tried to detect my hardware, it only wanted me to use Software Rendering, not recognizing my ATI. However, I overrode that setting, using DirectX settings. Interestingly, I was able to run the game seemingly without issue for about a half hour. Then I (stupidly) upgraded it to the GOTY version. This time it DID recognize my ATI card in initial setup, and I used DirectX rendering. The game ran for roughly 30 seconds, starting smoothly, stuttering, and shutting down the entire system. If anyone out there knows the main differences between the 2 UT versions that might be some help to understanding why one worked and the other didn't.

I thought it might be the graphics card, but software rendering for some of these games crashes the system as well, so I was thinking maybe a processor/chipset issue. But then I ran UT, and running on DirectX for one version of the game keeps it alive and the other crashes it.

The only other lead I might have is that the Broadcom wifi driver allegedly causes some system instability, potentially causing a system resource conflict, which I don't know how to manually resolve (I'm no expert in the IRQ-DMA stuff, a bit before my time), but that might be something someone here can help me with. So if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

Reply 1 of 3, by feda

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Are you sure nothing's overheating?
Also, get rid of any custom drivers, they tend to cause nothing but trouble.

Reply 2 of 3, by EriolGaurhoth

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Overheating might be the cause, although feeling the bottom of the computer, it doesn't seem that hot, but maybe I'm just used to newer hardware that gets a lot hotter than this.

If I were to troubleshoot for overheating, is there some kind of Windows 9x utility I can use that measures heat on the CPU and/or GPU?

As far as custom drivers goes, the first time I installed 98SE on this computer I used the latest non-custom ATI drivers for this card and they were actually somewhat worse as a few games got choppy and crashed sooner than it did on the custom drivers. I can try the old ones again, but I don't think it's going to make a difference.

Reply 3 of 3, by feda

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EriolGaurhoth wrote on 2023-03-17, 01:47:

Overheating might be the cause, although feeling the bottom of the computer, it doesn't seem that hot, but maybe I'm just used to newer hardware that gets a lot hotter than this.

If I were to troubleshoot for overheating, is there some kind of Windows 9x utility I can use that measures heat on the CPU and/or GPU?

As far as custom drivers goes, the first time I installed 98SE on this computer I used the latest non-custom ATI drivers for this card and they were actually somewhat worse as a few games got choppy and crashed sooner than it did on the custom drivers. I can try the old ones again, but I don't think it's going to make a difference.

If the problem is overheating then indeed, it won't make a difference.
Try Speedfan or Hwinfo32 which I think still has 9x support.
Check the fan RPMs to make sure they're spinning up.
Have you opened this laptop for cleaning?