Win98se gaming crashes. \ VOGONS

Win98se gaming crashes.

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First post, by Baoran

Posted on 2018-01-16, 15:06

Baoran Offline

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I recently rebuilt the pc I had back in 2004. I still had kept all the old parts, so that made it simple. I had windows xp running back then, but this time I wanted to make it a reasonably fast win98se system.
System specs:
Athlon 64 3500+ 512Mb ram (I heard it is not good idea to have more ram in win98se)
Asus A8V deluxe motherboard
Radeon 9700 pro
I also installed CMI 8738-mx based pci sound card and disabled on board audio. (I only own 2 pci sound cards. The CMI 8738-mx one and sound blaster live value)

After installing win98se, motherboard drivers, catalyst 6.2 and directX, I noticed serious stability issues when running games. Max Payne crashed after few minutes of playing. Deus ex crashed while still in the menu trying to start a new game.
For sake of making sure that no hardware was broken considering that the parts have been in storage for 10 years or so, I also installed windows xp on the same system. Everything was stable in windows xp. The same games I had tried in win98se were working just fine in windows XP.
I would appreciate any ideas on what to try to make the system stable when playing games in win98se.

Edit: Really not sure if this should be in hadware or software section of the forum...

Reply 1 of 5, by LHN91

Posted on 2018-01-16, 17:17

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Have you tried the Creative card in 98se? I've usually found the CMI sound chips to be a bit flaky.

Reply 2 of 5, by derSammler

Posted on 2018-01-16, 17:22

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Try with less RAM. 512 MB is already problematic with Win98.

Reply 3 of 5, by Baoran

Posted on 2018-01-16, 17:37

Baoran Offline

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The crashes only happen when using something with direct3d and when crash happens and game freezes, I can still reboot the computer by doing ctrl-alt-del twice. What makes it weird is that windows xp is completely stable with the same games. I have not noticed any problems with sound and also crashes do happen even if there is no sound card at all.

Reply 4 of 5, by Baoran

Posted on 2018-01-19, 14:24

Baoran Offline

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I managed to get it stable. I changed some agp bios options. I changed both "agp 3.0 calibration cycle" and "DBI output for AGP trans" to "enabled" and booted back to win98 and there has been no crashes anymore. I don't know which one of those bios settings made it stable though.
I also have no idea why changing bios settings would be required for win98se while everything worked fine in windows xp without those settings enables. Anyone has any ideas? Does enabling these settings slow down the graphics card?
I would like to learn more about these things that I would be able to solve these kind of problems more quickly in the future.

Reply 5 of 5, by chinny22

Posted on 2018-01-22, 18:05

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Google is your friend to find out what the bios options are.

It's also your friend with Win98 stability.
WinXP is built on NT which was designed around stability.
Win9x sacrifices stability for backward compatibility with dos.

Also AMD and ATI are not as stable as Intel and Nvidia, so you find certain hardware combinations require little tweaks like this to get working properly.
Luckily AMD/ATI had a enough of a fan base that a lot of this information is still on the internet.

Typing your motherboard or its chipset and the problem your having is a good place to start.

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