chinny22 wrote on 2023-06-09, 09:38:

2 main reasons for me. No booting into dos mode. Yes work arounds exist but just like Windows 8 Start Menu, why do I have to do […]
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2 main reasons for me.
No booting into dos mode. Yes work arounds exist but just like Windows 8 Start Menu, why do I have to do work arounds for issues that didn't exist on the previous version.
WinME was proven at the time of release to boot quicker but was actually slower at running things, not by much but again I'd rather a slower boot and have an extra fps in a game.
And really WinME didn't really offer me any benefits over 98 both of which was my gaming OS. For serious work I was using 2000.

I think WinME can be a good choice today if your doing a pure Win9x gaming rig but it lacks any nostalgic feeling so still go with 98

What kind of delays did he have compared to the 98? I saw some benchmarks, and Me did better than the 98 in almost all games, with 2-4 fps more.

There is one thing that causes a slight loss of fps: WDM drivers versus VXD drivers. For some reason, WDM drivers, especially for the sound card, could cause you to lose up to 10% performance compared to VXD drivers. WinME used (mostly) WDM drivers. Could this be the reason?

I may have a controversial opinion, but I HATE all unofficial win98 packs, all I tested left my system full of bloatware and unstable as FE, in addition to considerably increasing the amount of ram memory used. I really like the official microsoft patches, I have them all saved on my hd, and MS offered some support until 2008 for win98.

There are some things that I prefer ME to 98 (and I didn't find out how to fix it in 98), for example, every time I change a hardware, 98 opens a "wizard" to install the driver, before starting windows explorer, and i hate it. I like how ME installs silently. Another thing I hate about the 98, is that if you put a network card, the initialization can take MINUTES, I always avoided adding network cards to my 98 machines because of that.

I may be thinking out loud, but I believe that if there was a way to improve the ME VDM to perfectly run games that rely on dos stuff, it would be a better system than the 98.

> I may have a controversial opinion, but I HATE all unofficial win98 packs

Not around here. There vogons consensus for quite some time is that the 2004 security update plus usb drivers is the gold win98 standard.

kolderman wrote on 2023-06-09, 20:15:

> I may have a controversial opinion, but I HATE all unofficial win98 packs

Not around here. There vogons consensus for quite some time is that the 2004 security update plus usb drivers is the gold win98 standard.

Years ago I worked with IT and had one of those CDs localized for Portuguese Brazilian, unfortunately I used that CD until it started to peel. At that time (~2007) I only had a 40GB HDD and there was no way I could keep so many ISOs (I always downloaded a lot of torrents and I used to be a good seeder because demonoid had a reputation system), I never found another one like that located for Brazil. So I made a list of the official update patches, had to manually search for and download each update targeted for my native language, and used the autopatcher 2008 script to automate the installation process.

Sounds painful 🤣

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-09, 19:34:

There is one thing that causes a slight loss of fps: WDM drivers versus VXD drivers. For some reason, WDM drivers, especially for the sound card, could cause you to lose up to 10% performance compared to VXD drivers. WinME used (mostly) WDM drivers. Could this be the reason?

WDM is a compatibility layer to let Windows 2000 drivers run on Win9x, somewhat like the situation with ndiswrapper and linux, so it isn't surprising it would introduce many more abstraction layers and overhead versus VXDs which might be hand coded assembly.

i will be completely honest and try to explain this with how i felt back then when i was young.

from win98 i started using windows2000 and that was a beast ; rock solid.

when ,win ME was released i installed it a couple times and just to find that it was looking great in the UI but after installing some drivers, maybe nvidia or tv tuner card , or maybe sound, it just hanged with errors. A complete clean install, after some drivers and it ruined it all.

so, all this vxd and wdm driver thing was not something an average person would understand or know, so you ended up installing anything and it would just crash. Besides when it came out i belive not all companies were prepared with 100% tested drivers for winME and i think you had to install what the manufacturer website gave you and that was playing with a chernobyl.

I have read stories about people loving winME and that they never had any issues with it. I wonder if they saw an unicorn too, but maybe it was because they had a branded pc from HP or IBM where they actually tested their drivers on their propietary HDD images preinstalled.

of course all of this was when it was just released, and when something like that happens..you just trash it and go back to another OS.

Of course microsoft learned a lot from this with windowsXP, where they fixed a lot and worked a lot on what drivers you could install in order to avoid a mess.

and last thing i forgot, not having DOS back then with winME was not a big deal for me, we were playing other things, DOS games were during 486/pentium era. and left them in the past. in Windows ME era we were platying other stuff

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-06-10, 21:38:

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-09, 19:34:

There is one thing that causes a slight loss of fps: WDM drivers versus VXD drivers. For some reason, WDM drivers, especially for the sound card, could cause you to lose up to 10% performance compared to VXD drivers. WinME used (mostly) WDM drivers. Could this be the reason?

WDM is a compatibility layer to let Windows 2000 drivers run on Win9x, somewhat like the situation with ndiswrapper and linux, so it isn't surprising it would introduce many more abstraction layers and overhead versus VXDs which might be hand coded assembly.

In my opinion, the 286 drivers (*.DRV) written for 16-Bit Protected Mode were the most stable in practice.
In contrast to *.386 files (an older *.VXD breed), they used segmentation and had no "global-view" about the hardware and were more restricted thus.

That's both the greatest feature and danger of VxDs - they can claim full control over the system. That makes Sound Blaster emulation possible, too.
In conjunction with the heart of Windows 9x, the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM), they're capable of intercepting/trap things,
similar to EMM386 can.

Even if they wanted, the original 16-Bit Windows drivers couldn't do as much harm as VxDs thus (which are a variation of the Linear Executable/LE format).

They're simply too well behaved.
Shortly before Windows 3.0 was released,
Microsoft had even introduced new rules that Windows applications must be "clean".
No more direct memory manipulations, the fiddling with segment addresses was harming compatibility/stability with the both Protected-Mode kernals of the time (286 and 386 kernal).

I think this rule or doctrine also had an affect on Protected-Mode device drivers sort-of,
since Windows 2.x drivers of old couldn't be used in anything other than Windows 3.0 Real-Mode kernal (WIN /R).

By contrast, Windows 3.x drivers didn't have a similar restriction, they continued to work in 9x.
Personally, I think it's often overlooked that Windows 9x can still use these 16-Bit legacy drivers, in addition to WDM and VxDs.
Even Windows Me still can handle them.