I know there must be a solution to run win98 on dany bridge, because when I was an IT technician, I did maintenance on a CNC cutting machine, which was sandy bridge, but used win98 a pci express card that gave you serial ports that communicated with the machinery. The reason for this is because the machinery was built in the 90's, the original computer had some sort of irreparable problem and was replaced. The System didn't run in a VM, but I'm not sure what happened to make it run natively. I presume the company providing support may have developed custom support drivers or something.

Here in Brazil Windows 98 was used to the maximum, at the end of 2008 there was still a large user base. Many cyber cafes also used Win98 instead of XP, because there was a cultural idea that 98 performed much better than XP. But they used it on late hardware such as Pentium 4HT, Athlon XP, and Pentium D.

I also know that there were nice people developing support for win98, but at the time I wasn't interested. I remember a guy called Rudolph R. Loew who even built support for TRIM on ssds running on old systems

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-12, 16:04:

I know there must be a solution to run win98 on dany bridge, because when I was an IT technician, I did maintenance on a CNC cutting machine, which was sandy bridge, but used win98 a pci express card that gave you serial ports that communicated with the machinery. The reason for this is because the machinery was built in the 90's, the original computer had some sort of irreparable problem and was replaced. The System didn't run in a VM, but I'm not sure what happened to make it run natively. I presume the company providing support may have developed custom support drivers or something.

Here in Brazil Windows 98 was used to the maximum, at the end of 2008 there was still a large user base. Many cyber cafes also used Win98 instead of XP, because there was a cultural idea that 98 performed much better than XP. But they used it on late hardware such as Pentium 4HT, Athlon XP, and Pentium D.

I also know that there were nice people developing support for win98, but at the time I wasn't interested. I remember a guy called Rudolph R. Loew who even built support for TRIM on ssds running on old systems

This is really interesting insight and I thank you a bunch for sharing this. I love Windows 98 and knowing it was used well past EOL in other areas kind of reaffirms to me that it was a solid usable OS that has uses well beyond its expected lifetime.

To OP: There were some posts recently to the /r/windows98 subreddit recently regarding someone who successfully ran Windows 98 natively on a Ryzen host system with PCIe graphics. I won't link to due do the ongoing flux there, but it demonstrates that it can be done.

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our beloved games, and it's reasonably simple to come up with a list of possible hardware people would want for their games (486 to Pentium 3, 3dfx, ATI and some nvidia graphics cards, plus a few matrox, and mostly sound blaster, and some roland play, MPU, etc...) This all makes me think it's more feasible to have a capable hypervisor to emulate these things, because old games and w98 itself need, say, 10% of the potential of a ryzen? The other 90% of the power can easily be used to emulate a complex VST, CRT Simulation Shader, or 3dfx in other threads...

I believe that most video game consoles use a similar (not exactly the same) approach, but with a type 1 hypervisor in mind.

In my experience, I even managed to run win98 on modern hardware, but not at all satisfactorily, because there are simply no drivers for PCI Express, chipsets, graphics, sound, etc... It was like running windows in safe mode.

I think it's difficult for someone to develop drivers for 9x, and yet, I don't know if only drivers would be enough, because modern hardware works with very different approaches from those used in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Well. I for one have been amazed ever since I started wondering about Windows 98 and it's presence on the hardware that arrived after it.

I believe when we were made to believe by powerful organizations that Windows 98 was "no longer supported" because newer hardware would be incompatible; I see the evidence of a marketing deception.

The companies that make hardware and operating systems might no longer develop their product but it can easily be adapted by anyone who either knows how or can look up instructions about how it can be done.

This Windows 98 complication must have existed long enough to have a lot of interest by businesses and enthusiasts.

What I am noticing is that when it comes to all software with an x86 instruction set is closely tied to it's 64-bit version the x86-64 instruction set.

Assembly code instructions and microprocessor architecture are of course intertwined but what changes little is how virtual or software oriented op codes can be.

So, it's all on purpose that Windows 98 can run natively on hardware beyond its original support.

As for VMs, a level one hypervisor is closest to hardware compared with level two which runs like an application. Furthermore, as far as hardware support is concerned some hardware conferring performance improvements are actually made for direct access by a hypervisor. And they give names of different direct access methods all with advantages and non. But for the direct access of a GPU by say Hyper-V there is only one option to avoid a slow frame rate. It requires hardware (video card) supporting SRIOV and other hardware features that have been around for virtualization purposes for a long time.

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-12, 20:13:

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our be […]
Show full quote

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our beloved games, and it's reasonably simple to come up with a list of possible hardware people would want for their games (486 to Pentium 3, 3dfx, ATI and some nvidia graphics cards, plus a few matrox, and mostly sound blaster, and some roland play, MPU, etc...) This all makes me think it's more feasible to have a capable hypervisor to emulate these things, because old games and w98 itself need, say, 10% of the potential of a ryzen? The other 90% of the power can easily be used to emulate a complex VST, CRT Simulation Shader, or 3dfx in other threads...

I believe that most video game consoles use a similar (not exactly the same) approach, but with a type 1 hypervisor in mind.

In my experience, I even managed to run win98 on modern hardware, but not at all satisfactorily, because there are simply no drivers for PCI Express, chipsets, graphics, sound, etc... It was like running windows in safe mode.

I think it's difficult for someone to develop drivers for 9x, and yet, I don't know if only drivers would be enough, because modern hardware works with very different approaches from those used in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Something like this already exists, granted they are Type 2 (runs on an OS) versus Type 1 (runs on bare metal).

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/status.html

https://86box.net/

Seeing as these already accomplish the goal of simulating real hardware and can quickly saturate single thread performance on any CPU, is there anything these cannot do that the proposed Type 1 hypervisor can?

Cosmic wrote on 2023-06-12, 21:38:

Something like this already exists, granted they are Type 2 (runs on an OS) versus Type 1 (runs on bare metal). […]
Show full quote

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-12, 20:13:

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our be […]
Show full quote

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our beloved games, and it's reasonably simple to come up with a list of possible hardware people would want for their games (486 to Pentium 3, 3dfx, ATI and some nvidia graphics cards, plus a few matrox, and mostly sound blaster, and some roland play, MPU, etc...) This all makes me think it's more feasible to have a capable hypervisor to emulate these things, because old games and w98 itself need, say, 10% of the potential of a ryzen? The other 90% of the power can easily be used to emulate a complex VST, CRT Simulation Shader, or 3dfx in other threads...

I believe that most video game consoles use a similar (not exactly the same) approach, but with a type 1 hypervisor in mind.

In my experience, I even managed to run win98 on modern hardware, but not at all satisfactorily, because there are simply no drivers for PCI Express, chipsets, graphics, sound, etc... It was like running windows in safe mode.

I think it's difficult for someone to develop drivers for 9x, and yet, I don't know if only drivers would be enough, because modern hardware works with very different approaches from those used in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Something like this already exists, granted they are Type 2 (runs on an OS) versus Type 1 (runs on bare metal).

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/status.html

https://86box.net/

Seeing as these already accomplish the goal of simulating real hardware and can quickly saturate single thread performance on any CPU, is there anything these cannot do that the proposed Type 1 hypervisor can?

No, none of them are hypervisors. They are emulators, they literally emulate all necessary hardware. A hypervisor is like vmware, it doesn't emulate all hardware, the system runs directly using the system's memory and processor, but the hypervisor tells the guest system that it is from a different model.

The perfect example of a hypervisor was the late VirtualPC 2007. It was widely used by win9x programmers to develop and keep it running on more modern machines. But microsoft didn't like it and decided to kill it after windows 7. VirtualPC cannot be installed on windows 10.

If someone had access to the VPC7 source code and fixed and improved it, it would be the perfect solution. VPC7 was a hypervisor on x86 platforms and an emulator/translator on PowerPC Macintosh platforms. VirtualPC code harks back to the first emulators and hypervisors for i386 in the late 1980s. Long years of refinement have created a reliable and stable product. PCEm and x86box, their source code could be used for the development of GPU and Audio emulation/translation, while the processor (at least a single thread) should be destined directly to Windows 98 (as a good hypervisor would do), in addition to to provide a total of 2GB of ram for windows 98 (which is the manageable limit(Although, theoretically they are 4gb))

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-12, 22:05:

No, none of them are hypervisors. They are emulators, they literally emulate all necessary hardware. A hypervisor is like vmware […]
Show full quote

Cosmic wrote on 2023-06-12, 21:38:

Something like this already exists, granted they are Type 2 (runs on an OS) versus Type 1 (runs on bare metal). […]
Show full quote

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-12, 20:13:

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our be […]
Show full quote

I believe the most viable path is still a hypervisor under modern hardware, because I believe we all just want the 98 for our beloved games, and it's reasonably simple to come up with a list of possible hardware people would want for their games (486 to Pentium 3, 3dfx, ATI and some nvidia graphics cards, plus a few matrox, and mostly sound blaster, and some roland play, MPU, etc...) This all makes me think it's more feasible to have a capable hypervisor to emulate these things, because old games and w98 itself need, say, 10% of the potential of a ryzen? The other 90% of the power can easily be used to emulate a complex VST, CRT Simulation Shader, or 3dfx in other threads...

I believe that most video game consoles use a similar (not exactly the same) approach, but with a type 1 hypervisor in mind.

In my experience, I even managed to run win98 on modern hardware, but not at all satisfactorily, because there are simply no drivers for PCI Express, chipsets, graphics, sound, etc... It was like running windows in safe mode.

I think it's difficult for someone to develop drivers for 9x, and yet, I don't know if only drivers would be enough, because modern hardware works with very different approaches from those used in the late 90s, early 2000s.

Something like this already exists, granted they are Type 2 (runs on an OS) versus Type 1 (runs on bare metal).

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/status.html

https://86box.net/

Seeing as these already accomplish the goal of simulating real hardware and can quickly saturate single thread performance on any CPU, is there anything these cannot do that the proposed Type 1 hypervisor can?

No, none of them are hypervisors. They are emulators, they literally emulate all necessary hardware. A hypervisor is like vmware, it doesn't emulate all hardware, the system runs directly using the system's memory and processor, but the hypervisor tells the guest system that it is from a different model.

The perfect example of a hypervisor was the late VirtualPC 2007. It was widely used by win9x programmers to develop and keep it running on more modern machines. But microsoft didn't like it and decided to kill it after windows 7. VirtualPC cannot be installed on windows 10.

If someone had access to the VPC7 source code and fixed and improved it, it would be the perfect solution. VPC7 was a hypervisor on x86 platforms and an emulator/translator on PowerPC Macintosh platforms. VirtualPC code harks back to the first emulators and hypervisors for i386 in the late 1980s. Long years of refinement have created a reliable and stable product. PCEm and x86box, their source code could be used for the development of GPU and Audio emulation/translation, while the processor (at least a single thread) should be destined directly to Windows 98 (as a good hypervisor would do), in addition to to provide a total of 2GB of ram for windows 98 (which is the manageable limit(Although, theoretically they are 4gb))

I see, so the goal is sort of to have the CPU directly executing the kernel and programs, but have the hypervisor emulating the desired hardware, like specific sound cards, VGA cards, etc. versus PCem and 86Box which are emulating the CPU in addition to the supporting hardware. I suppose if you want to use real hardware pass-through for those devices, you'll still need drivers.

Hello. Well I decided I am going to run Windows 98 on a Pentium M target. Some Pentium IIIs are 1.0 thousand Khz. And Pentium M goes to over 2 GHz with bus speeds more than 400% that of Pentium III CopperMine's 133 MT/s bus.

I want to play Virtua cop and someone on vogons mentions a native Nvidia api that the game installer deploys if you have an nVidia card. However it was explained that the GeForce card was recognized as nVidia but it could not use the Nvidia api.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22167

These targets are 32-bit single threaded and the x86 instruction set. I have a Vogons link where just skimming over it they have windows 98 support for PCIe 1.

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44771

I feel like these technological advancements are a good pairing with Win 98 - if some one's curious to see how later machines change the original capabilities of the operating system. I don't think developers of windows 98 were expecting it to outlast katami Pentium III. While windows 98 saw many new hardware products, manufacturers kept making drivers that could be used to adapt the OS.

I have my reasons for not wanting an emulator or hypervisor. These items should work unprecedentedly near native speeds. I don't know why that is but the capabilities can be exciting for someone interested in getting started. My disagreement is I've had "fun" with MS HyperV and loved it. But two bad things coincided my forray: my GPU was cheap entry level and didn't support SRIOV (direct access). The bench mark I used showed 1 FPS in HyperV server vs 28 FPS native.

So, I now have a better card. I have not checked for pass through with HyperV at the others. The experience is like being a programmer when I am not. So, I moved away from hypervisors.

Why not look into the following vogons about W98 & QEMU:

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44771

Like I said in prior posts there is a lot of interest in this field and pastime.

Later

serialShinobi wrote on 2023-06-14, 03:28:

Hello. Well I decided I am going to run Windows 98 on a Pentium M target. Some Pentium IIIs are 1.0 thousand Khz. And Pentium M […]
Show full quote

Hello. Well I decided I am going to run Windows 98 on a Pentium M target. Some Pentium IIIs are 1.0 thousand Khz. And Pentium M goes to over 2 GHz with bus speeds more than 400% that of Pentium III CopperMine's 133 MT/s bus.

I want to play Virtua cop and someone on vogons mentions a native Nvidia api that the game installer deploys if you have an nVidia card. However it was explained that the GeForce card was recognized as nVidia but it could not use the Nvidia api.

These targets are 32-bit single threaded and the x86 instruction set. I have a Vogons link where just skimming over it they have windows 98 support for PCIe 1.

I feel like these technological advancements are a good pairing with Win 98 - if your curious to see how later machines change the original capabilities of the operating system. I don't think developers of windows 98 were expecting it to outlast katami Pentium III. While windows 98 saw many new hardware products, manufacturers kept making drivers that could be used to adapt the OS.

I have my reasons for not wanting an emulator or hypervisor. These items should work unprecedentedly near native speeds. I don't know why that is but the capabilities can be exciting for someone interested in getting started. My disagreement is I've had "fun" with MS HyperV and loved it. But two bad things coincided my forray: my GPU was cheap entry level and didn't support SRIOV (direct access). The bench mark I used showed 1 FPS in HyperV server vs 28 FPS native.

So, I now have a better card. I have not checked for pass through with HyperV at the others. The experience is like being a programmer when I am not. So, I moved away from hypervisors.

Why not look into the following vogons about W98 & QEMU:

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44771

Like I said in prior posts there is a lot of interest in this field and pastime.

Later

Pentium M is an excellent sweet spot to run 98 with maximum performance and compatibility. If I'm not mistaken there was support at some point from the intel gma950 for win9x as well as ac97 audio (not sure about hd audio).

Rudolph R. Loew was the guy who could get Win98 running on ryzen natively with some magic patch of a few kb.

I had 98 on an asus m6000 laptop or something, it was the fastest pentium M, with the most powerful laptop graphics card (Radeon 9700), and it used ddr2. Unfortunately the video card died, and I couldn't find a chip to replace it, because it was packaged in a package where the memories would be soldered onto the chipset itself. I used this little monster to render 3D scenes in the old style of the 90s, using web3D, and pose, I needed a powerful machine, because a simple animation would take 10 hours to render on a Tualatin 1.4ghz

Altogether, in over 10 years I haven't used my mother's 1999 IBM aptiva PIII/Win98.

But still have been wondering how to rebuild it. Her computer got me through in so many other times in my life that I wanted to take a shot at rebuilding it with a new motherboard and something for an ATX case in the IBM style. Thanks for the memories of days after the PIII. I was in prison when my mom got her self the Aptiva 580E. This was for 8 years so when released, Mom's Aptiva was what I used while most people were getting started with the dual core debate, e.g. "should I pay extra for two cores or just get one". Windows XP was in vouge but about to get replaced with Windows Vista.

I had no idea that there had been the centrino and Pentium M. I just knew about the core 2 duo. It was in every government institution I encountered. In every office.

And you can go down to a lowly "233MHz" processor if you see the specs for Windows XP.

Must have been a great future for everyone. When that future arrived. Now I'm in a new future where parallelism equals cash money and seems like hot & cold running water.

Any ideas on preparing for quantum superpositioning? Can we just get a certificate or take a boot camp for that?

serialShinobi wrote on 2023-06-14, 03:28:

Hello. Well I decided I am going to run Windows 98 on a Pentium M target. Some Pentium IIIs are 1.0 thousand Khz. And Pentium M […]
Show full quote

Hello. Well I decided I am going to run Windows 98 on a Pentium M target. Some Pentium IIIs are 1.0 thousand Khz. And Pentium M goes to over 2 GHz with bus speeds more than 400% that of Pentium III CopperMine's 133 MT/s bus.

I want to play Virtua cop and someone on vogons mentions a native Nvidia api that the game installer deploys if you have an nVidia card. However it was explained that the GeForce card was recognized as nVidia but it could not use the Nvidia api.

viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22167

These targets are 32-bit single threaded and the x86 instruction set. I have a Vogons link where just skimming over it they have windows 98 support for PCIe 1.

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44771

I feel like these technological advancements are a good pairing with Win 98 - if some one's curious to see how later machines change the original capabilities of the operating system. I don't think developers of windows 98 were expecting it to outlast katami Pentium III. While windows 98 saw many new hardware products, manufacturers kept making drivers that could be used to adapt the OS.

I have my reasons for not wanting an emulator or hypervisor. These items should work unprecedentedly near native speeds. I don't know why that is but the capabilities can be exciting for someone interested in getting started. My disagreement is I've had "fun" with MS HyperV and loved it. But two bad things coincided my forray: my GPU was cheap entry level and didn't support SRIOV (direct access). The bench mark I used showed 1 FPS in HyperV server vs 28 FPS native.

So, I now have a better card. I have not checked for pass through with HyperV at the others. The experience is like being a programmer when I am not. So, I moved away from hypervisors.

Why not look into the following vogons about W98 & QEMU:

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=44771

Like I said in prior posts there is a lot of interest in this field and pastime.

Later

1.0 thousand khz for a Pentium III ? Coppermine went up to 1.0Ghz and Tualatin went to 1.4Gh stock speed.

As for bare metal systems running Windows 98SE without any special patches, you can go up to Pentium 4 and beyond with
full ISA support. In fact, I've got a really special setup I am still looking for a part for that features a dual socket board and has full ISA support.

There is even a project out there now that goes above that and you can add ISA to much newer boards.

And if you don't need ISA, you can go way way higher for your system specs.

Yes. I am learning that Pentium 4 CPUs were available with an x86 instruction set which is compatible with Win98.

But they all used netburst. Which is not a good fit for i686 based software organization.

As in, you know, wasting a much more advanced system on a simple i686 thread.

I wanted to say 1.0 thousand MHz earlier. I felt that it was weird that their clock rate could be exactly one gigaahertz.

Here is a good article I found that compares Netburst to it's predecessor 13 years after the launch of first Netburst CPUs, the Pentium 4.

https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/06/17/i ... -success/

To get 98 running on the newest CPUs, even virtualized, you need to patch the TBL invalidation bug. After that, 98 will run on pretty much any x86-64 processor as designed. The x86-64 instruction set is backwards compatible all the way down to 16-bit real mode. It's all the hardware around the CPU that causes problems:

You'll need to limit the amount of RAM, or use RLoew's PATCHMEM to support RAM more than 512 MB if running on bare metal. The TBL patch and RLoew's patch both edit the same file but they are compatible. Patcher9X will happily apply the patch after applying RLoew's PATCHMEM.

RLoew's 9X AHCI driver can be added to support SATA devices in AHCI mode. It works on my X58 board with an ICH10 southbridge.

NUSB will add functionality to almost any USB 1 and 2 ports regardless of chipset. USB 3 sadly is totally out of 98's reach unless someone codes drivers for it. I don't know how it handles newer chipset with USB 2 and 3 though.

All the above can be added to 98's installer so you don't have to patch it in DOS or on another OS. There are DOS drivers available for the above too.

However, any GPU newer than ATI X800 series and NVidia 7000 series is totally out of the question, unless someone makes custom drivers for it. That's the biggest hurdle. I've seen some people put those old PCIe GPUs in modern motherboards and get 98 drivers to work with it. Even without chipset drivers. It's been done with Voodoo cards as well, using a PCIe to PCI bridge adapter.

@VDNKh

There is still an unresolved VCACHE error.

I get a VCACHE protection error on my Ryzen 5950x system even with PATCHMEM and patcher9x.
I haven't found a solution yet.

Duffman wrote on 2023-06-15, 01:51:

@VDNKh […]
Show full quote

@VDNKh

There is still an unresolved VCACHE error.

I get a VCACHE protection error on my Ryzen 5950x system even with PATCHMEM and patcher9x.
I haven't found a solution yet.

You can simply disable vcache. It's just a cache to optimize performance a bit. It is loaded through VXD, you need to clear your vmm32.vxd and use all VXDs in vmm32 folder, so you can stop using vcache.vxd

serialShinobi wrote on 2023-06-15, 00:12:

Yes. I am learning that Pentium 4 CPUs were available with an x86 instruction set which is compatible with Win98. […]
Show full quote

Yes. I am learning that Pentium 4 CPUs were available with an x86 instruction set which is compatible with Win98.

But they all used netburst. Which is not a good fit for i686 based software organization.

As in, you know, wasting a much more advanced system on a simple i686 thread.

I wanted to say 1.0 thousand MHz earlier. I felt that it was weird that their clock rate could be exactly one gigaahertz.

Here is a good article I found that compares Netburst to it's predecessor 13 years after the launch of first Netburst CPUs, the Pentium 4.

https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/06/17/i ... -success/

It's also a bit difficult to get pci express cards working in windows 98, it requires a bit more setup.

You can even use the latest Pentium 4 3.8Ghz which will work just as well. Although, a Pentium M running at 2.4ghz is almost as fast as a P4 3.8, but using 1/4 of the energy/TDP required.

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-15, 04:14:

serialShinobi wrote on 2023-06-15, 00:12:

Yes. I am learning that Pentium 4 CPUs were available with an x86 instruction set which is compatible with Win98. […]
Show full quote

Yes. I am learning that Pentium 4 CPUs were available with an x86 instruction set which is compatible with Win98.

But they all used netburst. Which is not a good fit for i686 based software organization.

As in, you know, wasting a much more advanced system on a simple i686 thread.

I wanted to say 1.0 thousand MHz earlier. I felt that it was weird that their clock rate could be exactly one gigaahertz.

Here is a good article I found that compares Netburst to it's predecessor 13 years after the launch of first Netburst CPUs, the Pentium 4.

https://chipsandcheese.com/2022/06/17/i ... -success/

It's also a bit difficult to get pci express cards working in windows 98, it requires a bit more setup.

You can even use the latest Pentium 4 3.8Ghz which will work just as well. Although, a Pentium M running at 2.4ghz is almost as fast as a P4 3.8, but using 1/4 of the energy/TDP required.

PCIe problems in Win98SE ???? didn't have a single problem getting a 7900GTX running in 98Se on a S775 board with an Intel C2D CPU.

PCIe should be transparent to 98SE.

@Rikintosh

How do I disable VCACHE?
I get the VCACHE protection error as soon as phase one of setup finishes, so I never get the chance to disable it.

Duffman wrote on 2023-06-15, 05:47:

@Rikintosh

How do I disable VCACHE?
I get the VCACHE protection error as soon as phase one of setup finishes, so I never get the chance to disable it.

During the hardware detection and configuration phase, the installation program places VXD drivers inside a vmm32.vxd file. This file is different from machine to machine for this reason. You need to replace your vmm32.vxd with a clean version, and use drivers separately in a folder called vmm32. Search about it on google, many people had problems and solved it this way in the past.