I used to run 98/NT4 dual boot back in the day.

98 - for DOS\9x only games that didn't work in NT4
NT4 - for games that did work, for Internet and for actual work.

Everything was faster on NT4 than 98 - Desktop experience and internet and more secure as well. Also no BSOD. 😀

You can check out my PC Game Compatibility list which has an NT4 column but I haven't updated it in quite awhile.

GDI\DirectDraw\OGL\Glide games work fine on NT4 but if the game uses newer Windows APIs then those games will not work.

Also IIRC swiftshader (so you can run some DX8/DX9 games) works fine on NT4 but you need ALOT of cpu power to use swiftshader.

DOSBox 0.74 and ScummVM work fine on NT4 btw.

If you have the horsepower and plenty of ram then the old versions of Vmware v4 and VPC v5 will work on NT4 so you could play those 9x games that don't work on NT4 (but you are really better off dual booting).

The reason NTCompatible lists other OS issues with the games is that most of the time the same fixes apply. For instance if I have to use compatibility mode or the App Compat tool on Windows 2000 then more than likely I'll have to do the same thing with XP+.

I had similar almost euphoric feelings when I installed nt4 on a dual-celeron-500 box recently. The smp capability of nt4 obviously helps even more.

You need to install IE4.0 [with the desktop upgrade] to get dosbox to work, afaik [and I can confirm it fixed the error I was getting].

How can NT4 be used for gaming anyway btw?

I've been thinking of giving NT4 a try, but I will kinda want a reason to try it. I wouldn't mind doing (lots of) tweaking in order to get things to work.

Also advice on hardware + NT4 + gaming would be appreciated 😀

Btw, the last time I used NT4 was years ago, back when it was still being used in universities for internet and such.

@dosfreak; Thanks for the most helpful post! My preliminary thoughts are that DOS games and anything DX5.x and above are going to be a bit of a pain. But as you've pointed out there are workarounds for this.... guess I'm gonna have to try them and rediscover a 15 year old o/s all again. There's great fun to be had there!

@ratfink: I missed using that word, but I think euphoria sums it up. I can only imagine what it would be like in SMP. Makes me wanna go build an early socket 5/7/8 dual cpu system just to experience it. Man, HAVE I missed out a lot!

I love doing things the unconventional way, especially when there's great benefits to be reaped. Working to perfect it is part of the fun to me. Some time ago when I was getting into Linux I remember feeling all 1337 and all about having a 64 bit system so far ahead of XP it was mind-blowing. And I played almost any game I wanted to on it so it just goes to show that you can achieve most anything if you put some effort into it.

I just went through dosfreak's list. Interesting to note that 99 games "just work" in win98 but 262 games just work in Win NT4! Hhaha... that's enough to keep me satisfied and there's a few of my favourites listed there too to boot!

Well I used NT4 for years, basically skipped Win9x (except rare dual boots).

Interesting could be:
SMP (I currently have a Dual P233MMX f.e.)
a lot of memory (for modern browsers as FF 2.0.0.20)
GLIDE/OpenGL for 3D - astonishingly lot of early games run on NT4
DirectDraw3 is sufficient for many 2D games, as Diablo f.e.
RAS/NETBEUI network over a serial nullmodem connection to Win 3.x is supported
the 2D graphics subsystem is easily by a factor of 5 faster than on Win9x on the same system
Third party support for USB..., but no KernelEx.
If the system is setup it usually is stable and fast. (at least a Pentium with 64 MB recommended), still the overall resource footprint is low.
Multitasking is much more fluent than on Win9x, thats why NT4 was the second preferred OS for multiple BBS nodes on the same system (just after OS/2).
It really feels like a VMS with a Win95 GUI, much different than Win2K.

I don't see how more games can work under NT 4.0 than under 98 since 98 supports DX9. That's a huge number of games that NT hacked to use DX5 will never be able to run.

Yeah the 9x/NT4 columns on my list aren't that great since I first started out the list for Windows 2000 compatibility. So right now I've probably done more testing with NT4 than I have with 9x.

DOSBox and ScummVM compatibility with Sierra games recently made that alot easier. 😉

I really need to do more testing on 9x especially since kernelex has gotten so good.

I thought about looking at Blackwingcat and Old Cigarette Windows 2000 API wrappers and modifying them for NT4 but I've really got to much on my plate already.

IIRC WineD3D supports D3d->OGL wrapping so that could be an option as well don't know if it supports NT4 though.

Another good link to check out for NT4 people is: http://www.bearwindows.boot-land.net/winnt4.htm

Windows NT 4.0, you say? I've been using NT 4.0 since 1998 and am still using it on my everyday computer. In fact, I'm using it with this forum on the World's Fastest 486. My longest 486 uptime where I used the computer everyday with NT 4.0 was almost 5 months.

There's was also a DX6 hack for NT 4.0, but I was not able to get DX6-supporting games to work with it. In fact, it had problems even with DX3 games. It is no wonder this hack was not very popular and any reference to it has practically vanished online these days.

Some drivers, such as Creative's AWE64Gold driver has PnP support for NT4.0. This works fine for me. The IONetworks NT4-USB version 4.06 works great for using USB on NT4.0. It supports hot-swapping USB 1.1/2.0 mice, keyboards, SD cards, hard drives, some web cams, etc.

I have not had much issues with NT 4.0 drivers; it just takes some getting used to.

I am not a big gamer, but Subspace (Continuum) works fine as well as many DOS games which use the PC speaker. You can re-route your PC speaker thru the desktop speakers fairly easy on the AWE64Gold.

My NT 4.0 DOS game list:
DosBox 0.72
Aldo
Bananoid
Black Out - 3D Tetris
Bubble Ball
Condum Game (Flash)
Cruel
Exile
Golf
Paganitzu
Pegged
Skyrider
Taipei
Tetris
TicTactics
Subspace

I also recently discovered 3rd party DPMS support for NT 4.0 -- it turns off your monitor when the screen saver turns on. Not impressive by XP/2000 standards, but highly desirable if your still using NT4.0 for everyday computing.

Office97 also works great in NT 4.0. If interested, you can find my full everyday NT4.0 software list in the World's Fastest 486 post.

Thanks feipoa! Great reading and some very good info there. Actually after playing around with NT4 I'm finding that it is actually quite easy to install drivers and such- just that maybe not seeing a single hardware list is a bit disorientating at first.

My Dell Optiplex GXPro seems like it was made to be pnp with NT4- the SB vibra 16c sound card only needs you to select and install it from the control panel. Same with the 3com 3c905B ethernet card- just select it from the list and away you go.

For video cards I have a Matrox Millenium II which has some excellent drivers that required no fiddling. And I installed an Orchid Righteous 3d with the last reference drivers. That was a bit disorientating as it doesn't show up on the multimedia screen- yet Quake 2 in 3dfx miniGL works perfectly at 640x480.

The hard disk I'm using is a Seagate Barracuda fast scsi- 2.1gb, 7200rpm formatted in FAT16 and connected to an Adaptec 2940 scsi controller. All this was pnp.

The NT4 install has been upgraded to sp6, with the last hotfix pack. I have also installed diskeeper for disk defragmentation, USB drivers, unofficial dx5, winrar, etc.

I'm gonna get it on the net next after buying a long 15m ethernet cable as I have actually gone wireless some time ago so the router is very far from where this little feller is seated. Then get some modern browsers working and post from it just for laughs.

Next would be installing office 97 (I have an ancient copy somewhere) and some games- maybe play TA or my favourite Dark Colony.

Overall, this has been a very pleasant and great learning experience.
Keep 'em coming gentlemen!

Doh! Just noticed the NT4 compatibility list dosfreak mentioned! -_-

DosFreak wrote:

Yeah the 9x/NT4 columns on my list aren't that great since I first started out the list for Windows 2000 compatibility. So right […]
Show full quote

Yeah the 9x/NT4 columns on my list aren't that great since I first started out the list for Windows 2000 compatibility. So right now I've probably done more testing with NT4 than I have with 9x.

DOSBox and ScummVM compatibility with Sierra games recently made that alot easier. 😉

I really need to do more testing on 9x especially since kernelex has gotten so good.

I thought about looking at Blackwingcat and Old Cigarette Windows 2000 API wrappers and modifying them for NT4 but I've really got to much on my plate already.

IIRC WineD3D supports D3d->OGL wrapping so that could be an option as well don't know if it supports NT4 though.

Another good link to check out for NT4 people is: http://www.bearwindows.boot-land.net/winnt4.htm

Why did you test individual games that run under other emulators with each operating system? Isn't it enough to say whether a particular operating system will run something like MAME without having to test each MAME ROM individually? The MAME ROM does not access the operating system in any direct way, so the operating system should have no bearing on whether a particular ROM runs or not. It shouldn't matter if MAME is running on NT, 98 or XP it should run ALL ROMS identically.

It's not the ROM but the emulator. Sadly as emulators progress some of them lose older OS support so I either have to note that version under the OS or use a different emulator.

If I use a different emulator or an old version of that emulator then yes I have to test the game again. 🙁

I do really like NT4 even when I was totally sworn to 98SE.
The compatibility list is pretty impressive but I'm not sure why Doom and Quake need a port when the original windows version works just fine on NT4
Hmm the copy of Red Alert I tried worked on NT4 but perhaps it was a "mini" version rather then the official version.

I so need to play around with my NT4 boxes some more I just keep finding things to make me busy

What would be the latest era of hardware generally supporting nt4... p3 and early athlon?

PS. I just shifted a hard drive from a bx-based dual celeron system to a tualatin on a via board. Surprised me, nt4 booted fine. Not having the arcane knowledge, I'd assumed that like 2000 it would take it's ball home if you swapped the motherboard [other than like-for-like]...

The mass storage controller driver is what sends NT/2K/XP to hell when changing the mainboard. If you exchange with a mainboard with the same IDE controller it should work. You can try UNIATA, they say they support many controllers and NT 4.

ratfink wrote:

What would be the latest era of hardware generally supporting nt4... p3 and early athlon?

PS. I just shifted a hard drive from a bx-based dual celeron system to a tualatin on a via board. Surprised me, nt4 booted fine. Not having the arcane knowledge, I'd assumed that like 2000 it would take it's ball home if you swapped the motherboard [other than like-for-like]...

Probably P3 era stuff for the most part, but I actually ran NT4 on a P4-based Dell Inspiron 1100 laptop for a while. It had most of its RAM go bad so it only had 128MB in it (and was EXTREMELY picky regarding what RAM it would take, so nothing I had or bought for it would work!), but I needed Windows and NT4 had low enough RAM requirements to have some breathing room. I managed to find drivers for everything in it, surprisingly... even the onboard audio (although it was quite a challenge). Ran great, too, even going online with K-Meleon!

sp6 (maybe sp5) supports DMA mode natively in the standard MS provided IDE drivers... it is not on by default and there's no control panel to get to it... you have to start the util manually to launch it and enable

triones drivers also work for the 430 based boards... not sure about 440.... they support udma but do not allow device specific DMA mode settings, only per channel

How do you start it manually? Maybe you can provide a few step-by-step instructions?

What does setting ATAPI to started in Control Panel/Devices do? Is this only for IDE CD/DVD-ROM drives, or also for IDE hard drives?