You need to remove MSCDEX from autoexec *and* the CDROM driver from your config.sys.
Btw which mainboard is in this Gateway model?

It's a 1994 PC, you're better off putting DOS 6.22/Win3.11 or Win95 at the latest on that. Despite what the 'system requirements' say, Win98 was really made for late Pentiums.

That said, I don't think you really have any issues per say. That machine likely has to use legacy methods for access which craters your performance. It probably doesn't support DMA and way too little RAM for 98 (they came with 8mb iirc). I would be surprised if there are any working drivers specifically for 98, you could scour archive.org and try various CDs to see if they have the drivers for your machine. I'm not sure if Gateway added every driver into those or tailored the CD for a specific machine.

If you're wanting a Win98 PC, I would pick up a Pentium II or newer. Or if you want to use this specific machine, 'downgrade' it to Win95 or DOS 6.22. You'll have a much better time with it.

Best of luck!

pyrogx wrote on 2023-04-22, 09:17:

You need to remove MSCDEX from autoexec *and* the CDROM driver from your config.sys.
Btw which mainboard is in this Gateway model?

It's an Intel PBA-634383-809 mainboard. I can't see any reference to any CDROM driver in config.sys, just that MSCDEX in autoexec...

gen_angry wrote on 2023-04-22, 09:59:

It's a 1994 PC, you're better off putting DOS 6.22/Win3.11 or Win95 at the latest on that. Despite what the 'system requirement […]
Show full quote

It's a 1994 PC, you're better off putting DOS 6.22/Win3.11 or Win95 at the latest on that. Despite what the 'system requirements' say, Win98 was really made for late Pentiums.

That said, I don't think you really have any issues per say. That machine likely has to use legacy methods for access which craters your performance. It probably doesn't support DMA and way too little RAM for 98 (they came with 8mb iirc). I would be surprised if there are any working drivers specifically for 98, you could scour archive.org and try various CDs to see if they have the drivers for your machine. I'm not sure if Gateway added every driver into those or tailored the CD for a specific machine.

If you're wanting a Win98 PC, I would pick up a Pentium II or newer. Or if you want to use this specific machine, 'downgrade' it to Win95 or DOS 6.22. You'll have a much better time with it.

Best of luck!

Ok thanks, I'll certainly keep that in mind - this machine was an ebay purchase that came with Win98 installed, so I'm not tied to it in any way. I take it to "downgrade", we're talking about a completely fresh install of Win 95? Can I boot to DOS from Win 98, and do a fresh install of Win 95 from CD there? Or do I need to get hold of a boot floppy?

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:12:

It's an Intel PBA-634383-809 mainboard. I can't see any reference to any CDROM driver in config.sys, just that MSCDEX in autoexec...

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache.
It's this one: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … vanced-zp-zappa
You might want to check for a BIOS update.

There has to be a CDROM driver in your config.sys, otherwise mscdex wouldn't find your cd drive. Check for a line with something like "/D:MSCD000" inside.

pyrogx wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:22:

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache. It […]
Show full quote

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:12:

It's an Intel PBA-634383-809 mainboard. I can't see any reference to any CDROM driver in config.sys, just that MSCDEX in autoexec...

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache.
It's this one: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … vanced-zp-zappa
You might want to check for a BIOS update.

There has to be a CDROM driver in your config.sys, otherwise mscdex wouldn't find your cd drive. Check for a line with something like "/D:MSCD000" inside.

Yep you were spot on!! There were three entries to a "Future Domain PowerIDE!" device in config.sys which I assumed was just HDD related, but removing all of those and rebooting is now showing the Fireball and CD-ROM in Windows 98 Device Manager, and now no exclamation mark on Secondary IDE, and no DOS compatability message in Performance 😀 Thanks for your help.

Shame to hear this board is crappy... it as at least on the last BIOS they made (1.00.11.BS0T) allowing for the 8.4gb Fireball.

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:43:

pyrogx wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:22:

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache. It […]
Show full quote

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:12:

It's an Intel PBA-634383-809 mainboard. I can't see any reference to any CDROM driver in config.sys, just that MSCDEX in autoexec...

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache.
It's this one: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … vanced-zp-zappa
You might want to check for a BIOS update.

There has to be a CDROM driver in your config.sys, otherwise mscdex wouldn't find your cd drive. Check for a line with something like "/D:MSCD000" inside.

Yep you were spot on!! There were three entries to a "Future Domain PowerIDE!" device in config.sys which I assumed was just HDD related, but removing all of those and rebooting is now showing the Fireball and CD-ROM in Windows 98 Device Manager, and now no exclamation mark on Secondary IDE, and no DOS compatability message in Performance 😀 Thanks for your help.

Shame to hear this board is crappy... it as at least on the last BIOS they made (1.00.11.BS0T) allowing for the 8.4gb Fireball.

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. You can use any classic Pentium CPU (non MMX) on these from a P75 to P200 (150,166,200 with a trivial cpu mod connecting 2 pins together).
The board DOES support DMA, specifically MW-DMA2 , around 17-22MB/s. Make sure you tick DMA in Win98 device manager under both hard drives (BIG speed difference on a P75 - cpu usage is close to 90%+ whenever the HD is accessed without DMA enabled and stuck in PIO mode). I ran Win98 on these in the late 90's fine, just make sure you use EDO RAM, 32MB minimum, 64MB works best. You get a great compatible DOS motherboard thrown in as well. Also it's trivial to clock the P75 to a P100 on this motherboard, just change SW1 block -switch number 8 from 'off' to 'on'.
Look in the MR-BIOS thread, if you use the latest 3.46 Zappa compatible bios for your motherboard the bios supports HD up to 128GB, among other extras.

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-04-22, 21:37:

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. […]
Show full quote

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:43:

pyrogx wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:22:

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache. It […]
Show full quote

That's an Intel Andanced/ZP "Zappa" board - which is known to be crappy... sometimes these things even come without L2 cache.
It's this one: https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/intel- … vanced-zp-zappa
You might want to check for a BIOS update.

There has to be a CDROM driver in your config.sys, otherwise mscdex wouldn't find your cd drive. Check for a line with something like "/D:MSCD000" inside.

Yep you were spot on!! There were three entries to a "Future Domain PowerIDE!" device in config.sys which I assumed was just HDD related, but removing all of those and rebooting is now showing the Fireball and CD-ROM in Windows 98 Device Manager, and now no exclamation mark on Secondary IDE, and no DOS compatability message in Performance 😀 Thanks for your help.

Shame to hear this board is crappy... it as at least on the last BIOS they made (1.00.11.BS0T) allowing for the 8.4gb Fireball.

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. You can use any classic Pentium CPU (non MMX) on these from a P75 to P200 (150,166,200 with a trivial cpu mod connecting 2 pins together).
The board DOES support DMA, specifically MW-DMA2 , around 17-22MB/s. Make sure you tick DMA in Win98 device manager under both hard drives (BIG speed difference on a P75 - cpu usage is close to 90%+ whenever the HD is accessed without DMA enabled and stuck in PIO mode). I ran Win98 on these in the late 90's fine, just make sure you use EDO RAM, 32MB minimum, 64MB works best. You get a great compatible DOS motherboard thrown in as well. Also it's trivial to clock the P75 to a P100 on this motherboard, just change SW1 block -switch number 8 from 'off' to 'on'.
Look in the MR-BIOS thread, if you use the latest 3.46 Zappa compatible bios for your motherboard the bios supports HD up to 128GB, among other extras.

Well that's awesome, thanks! I'll take a look at that BIOS thread. The PC arrived with 24mb RAM, it's slightly sluggish in Win98 but not terrible, but I'll look into a RAM upgrade and look into that CPU overclock.

One issue I've got is I think related to CDROM performance, I'm finding that FMV in games stutter really badly (in both DOS and Win98), usually unwatchable so I just have to skip (tried a few like Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Little Big Adventure). I had a 486 DX-22 66 back in the day that played these fine so I know the system is capable. DMA is on for both HDD, I tried it for the CDROM but Win98 just turned back off on reboot so I assume not compatible with this CD-ROM. Is there anything else I can try, other than a quicker drive?

Not sure about those exact games but it may be that the CD drive is too fast. I had a 24x in a 486 which struggled to keep up with the drive. You could hear the CD-ROM spin up and I assume fill its cache then start spinning down again, the video would then freeze while waiting for the drive had to spin back up again.

You could try CD slowdown utilities. These work in dos and windows. Windows you have the additional option of a virtual CD drive as well.

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-24, 09:17:

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-04-22, 21:37:

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. […]
Show full quote

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-22, 11:43:

Yep you were spot on!! There were three entries to a "Future Domain PowerIDE!" device in config.sys which I assumed was just HDD related, but removing all of those and rebooting is now showing the Fireball and CD-ROM in Windows 98 Device Manager, and now no exclamation mark on Secondary IDE, and no DOS compatability message in Performance 😀 Thanks for your help.

Shame to hear this board is crappy... it as at least on the last BIOS they made (1.00.11.BS0T) allowing for the 8.4gb Fireball.

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. You can use any classic Pentium CPU (non MMX) on these from a P75 to P200 (150,166,200 with a trivial cpu mod connecting 2 pins together).
The board DOES support DMA, specifically MW-DMA2 , around 17-22MB/s. Make sure you tick DMA in Win98 device manager under both hard drives (BIG speed difference on a P75 - cpu usage is close to 90%+ whenever the HD is accessed without DMA enabled and stuck in PIO mode). I ran Win98 on these in the late 90's fine, just make sure you use EDO RAM, 32MB minimum, 64MB works best. You get a great compatible DOS motherboard thrown in as well. Also it's trivial to clock the P75 to a P100 on this motherboard, just change SW1 block -switch number 8 from 'off' to 'on'.
Look in the MR-BIOS thread, if you use the latest 3.46 Zappa compatible bios for your motherboard the bios supports HD up to 128GB, among other extras.

Well that's awesome, thanks! I'll take a look at that BIOS thread. The PC arrived with 24mb RAM, it's slightly sluggish in Win98 but not terrible, but I'll look into a RAM upgrade and look into that CPU overclock.

One issue I've got is I think related to CDROM performance, I'm finding that FMV in games stutter really badly (in both DOS and Win98), usually unwatchable so I just have to skip (tried a few like Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Little Big Adventure). I had a 486 DX-22 66 back in the day that played these fine so I know the system is capable. DMA is on for both HDD, I tried it for the CDROM but Win98 just turned back off on reboot so I assume not compatible with this CD-ROM. Is there anything else I can try, other than a quicker drive?

Torisan S16 I think was rebranded sanyo 6x speed, so it should be fast enough. P75 is easily fast enough for playing the FMV cutscenes on these games. When you play the games in dos do you mean a dos box in win98 or booting directly to dos.
You can benchmark the cdrom using speedsys from https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html
It should be around 900KB/s. Do that booting directly to dos without emm386 loaded.
Also I don't know what DOS cdrom driver you have loaded in but try:
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/VIDE-CDD.SYS
This is only need in dos, don't load in when booting to win98. You can comment it out adding REM at the start of the line.
If the fmv start playing smoothly in DOS after the above it narrows it down to win98 problem.

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-04-24, 13:28:

Torisan S16 I think was rebranded sanyo 6x speed, so it should be fast enough. P75 is easily fast enough for playing the FMV cu […]
Show full quote

jimnastics wrote on 2023-04-24, 09:17:

Riikcakirds wrote on 2023-04-22, 21:37:

The Intel-Advanced Zappa is a great classic pentium board and stable as fcuk. I serviced loads of these in the mid to late 90's. You can use any classic Pentium CPU (non MMX) on these from a P75 to P200 (150,166,200 with a trivial cpu mod connecting 2 pins together).
The board DOES support DMA, specifically MW-DMA2 , around 17-22MB/s. Make sure you tick DMA in Win98 device manager under both hard drives (BIG speed difference on a P75 - cpu usage is close to 90%+ whenever the HD is accessed without DMA enabled and stuck in PIO mode). I ran Win98 on these in the late 90's fine, just make sure you use EDO RAM, 32MB minimum, 64MB works best. You get a great compatible DOS motherboard thrown in as well. Also it's trivial to clock the P75 to a P100 on this motherboard, just change SW1 block -switch number 8 from 'off' to 'on'.
Look in the MR-BIOS thread, if you use the latest 3.46 Zappa compatible bios for your motherboard the bios supports HD up to 128GB, among other extras.

Well that's awesome, thanks! I'll take a look at that BIOS thread. The PC arrived with 24mb RAM, it's slightly sluggish in Win98 but not terrible, but I'll look into a RAM upgrade and look into that CPU overclock.

One issue I've got is I think related to CDROM performance, I'm finding that FMV in games stutter really badly (in both DOS and Win98), usually unwatchable so I just have to skip (tried a few like Theme Park, Theme Hospital and Little Big Adventure). I had a 486 DX-22 66 back in the day that played these fine so I know the system is capable. DMA is on for both HDD, I tried it for the CDROM but Win98 just turned back off on reboot so I assume not compatible with this CD-ROM. Is there anything else I can try, other than a quicker drive?

Torisan S16 I think was rebranded sanyo 6x speed, so it should be fast enough. P75 is easily fast enough for playing the FMV cutscenes on these games. When you play the games in dos do you mean a dos box in win98 or booting directly to dos.
You can benchmark the cdrom using speedsys from https://www.philscomputerlab.com/dos-benchmark-pack.html
It should be around 900KB/s. Do that booting directly to dos without emm386 loaded.
Also I don't know what DOS cdrom driver you have loaded in but try:
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/VIDE-CDD.SYS
This is only need in dos, don't load in when booting to win98. You can comment it out adding REM at the start of the line.
If the fmv start playing smoothly in DOS after the above it narrows it down to win98 problem.

I've just be doing the Windows 98 "Restart into MS-DOS mode" and running from there, editing the dosstart.bat file as required. Using MSCDEX as the CDROM driver. Maybe I should try a straight boot to DOS? I'll have a play around over the weekend with your suggestions, thank you 😀

chinny22 wrote on 2023-04-24, 10:10:

Not sure about those exact games but it may be that the CD drive is too fast. I had a 24x in a 486 which struggled to keep up with the drive. You could hear the CD-ROM spin up and I assume fill its cache then start spinning down again, the video would then freeze while waiting for the drive had to spin back up again.

You could try CD slowdown utilities. These work in dos and windows. Windows you have the additional option of a virtual CD drive as well.

Interesting thanks, I'll have a play with the CD slowdown idea as well.

gen_angry wrote on 2023-04-22, 09:59:

It's a 1994 PC, you're better off putting DOS 6.22/Win3.11 or Win95 at the latest on that. Despite what the 'system requirement […]
Show full quote

It's a 1994 PC, you're better off putting DOS 6.22/Win3.11 or Win95 at the latest on that. Despite what the 'system requirements' say, Win98 was really made for late Pentiums.

That said, I don't think you really have any issues per say. That machine likely has to use legacy methods for access which craters your performance. It probably doesn't support DMA and way too little RAM for 98 (they came with 8mb iirc). I would be surprised if there are any working drivers specifically for 98, you could scour archive.org and try various CDs to see if they have the drivers for your machine. I'm not sure if Gateway added every driver into those or tailored the CD for a specific machine.

If you're wanting a Win98 PC, I would pick up a Pentium II or newer. Or if you want to use this specific machine, 'downgrade' it to Win95 or DOS 6.22. You'll have a much better time with it.

Best of luck!

I just purchased a P5-90, not sure how different they are to the P5-75 , but the one I got has 16MB of RAM. I plan on installing Windows 98 on it (it has 95 pre=installed). Can I simply upgrade the RAM to let's say 128MB or is there a hardware limitation on the motherboard/chipset on these? If I can, is there a specific type of RAM that I need to use on these? I found a listing on ebay for :"28MB (2 x 64MB) DESKTOP MEMORY PC100 PC66 3.3V SDRAM 168 PIN NON-ECC DIMM RAM". Would this work?

Another thing! I know you referred to drivers being hard to find. I'm assuming the only drivers that I need to install would be the graphics card right? What other drivers do I need to hunt for the 98 counterpart?

You seem well informed about these computers, I would greatly appreciate the help. I see a lot of them in good condition actually popping up on eBay right now, I guess people are just reminiscing now about the actual simplistic style of these machines. They do look beautiful.