Server 2003 and XP x64 was XP branch done right while regular XP was inferior buggy product for consumertards (ask Dave Cutler). But then again, I've always had better experience with NT 6.x. On top of that, I probably spent too much time on MSFN forum. Perhaps it's where my disdain for XP comes from.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-15, 22:38:

Server 2003 and XP x64 was XP branch done right while regular XP was inferior buggy product for consumertards (ask Dave Cutler).

I saw his interview on Dave's Garage, and there's no doubt in my mind that he's right. Both Daves are brilliant engineers, and I wish Microsoft had talented people like that doing work on their current Windows versions.

Doesn't change the fact that game developers and Creative Labs primarily targeted WinXP 32-bit, since that was what 90% of PC gamers were using at the time. That's why the majority of EAX games work best on that OS, despite its shortcomings.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-15, 22:38:

Server 2003 and XP x64 was XP branch done right while regular XP was inferior buggy product for consumertards (ask Dave Cutler). But then again, I've always had better experience with NT 6.x. On top of that, I probably spent too much time on MSFN forum. Perhaps it's where my disdain for XP comes from.

Nah, everyone knows that Windows XP 64 Bit Edition was the most superior version! 😉

Edit:

I saw his interview on Dave's Garage, and there's no doubt in my mind that he's right. Both Daves are brilliant engineers, and I wish Microsoft had talented people like that doing work on their current Windows versions.

I wouldn't bet on that, though. The statements about OS/2 show a certain incompetence.

Edit:

Doesn't change the fact that game developers and Creative Labs primarily targeted WinXP 32-bit, since that was what 90% of PC gamers were using at the time. That's why the majority of EAX games work best on that OS, despite its shortcomings.

AFAIK, Windows 98SE was very popular until 2004 or so.
It had been touted for having better FPS or something.
Official EOL was 2006 or so.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-11-15, 22:53:

AFAIK, Windows 98SE was very popular until 2004 or so.
It had been touted for having better FPS or something.
Official EOL was 2006 or so.

If this video is to be believed (I don't know what sources it's based on) Win98 had 11% market share in 2004, and it was rapidly declining.

This kinda falls in line with what I remember from that time. After WinXP SP1 shipped in 2002, making the OS more reliable, people started mass migrating to it. Performance wise, I do recall Win98 having a smaller memory footprint. So if you were starved for RAM, it could have been a bit faster. Maybe.

It's still absurd that the driver dated 2022 doesn't make it work. And you'd have to know x86_64 ASM better than Chinese know their hieroglyphs to get to the bottom of it. It may not even have much to do with XP, maybe it would be more fair to blame Creative's incompetence or shady practices. The existence of modified driver packs for their products speaks on its own.

It's something silly anyway, because bells and whistles work through OpenAL.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-15, 23:13:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-11-15, 22:53:

AFAIK, Windows 98SE was very popular until 2004 or so.
It had been touted for having better FPS or something.
Official EOL was 2006 or so.

If this video is to be believed (I don't know what sources it's based on) Win98 had 11% market share in 2004, and it was rapidly declining.

This kinda falls in line with what I remember from that time. After WinXP SP1 shipped in 2002, making the OS more reliable, people started mass migrating to it. Performance wise, I do recall Win98 having a smaller memory footprint. So if you were starved for RAM, it could have been a bit faster. Maybe.

Hi, I agree that Windows XP got very popular.
But in gaming, Windows 98SE remained popular for a while.
I read about this in forums, though.

The video is slightly flawed, I'm afraid. It doesn't cover the the uprise of ultra portable PCs by the mid-late 2000s.
Such as UMPCs or the Asus Eee PC line, which gave Windows XP a second life because then-current Windows Vista was too powerhungry.
I can't prove that of course, but it seems strange that the numbers for XP keep falling so steadily despite the second life of XP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-mobile_PC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC

Edit: Another misleading thing is the rise of Windows 95/98 and simultanous fall of DOS in those videos.
Because it doesn't consider that MS-DOS 7.x is a core part of the OS, or that other DOSes existed.
By mid-90s Novell DOS 7, PC-DOS 2000, PTS/Paragon DOS were brand new at the time.

So strictly speaking, DOS was still "there" up until the mid-2000s, all in all.
As a games platform it remained relevant up until 1997, at least.
Great DOS games such as Toonstruck (late '96) were released in second half of the 90s.

Windows for Workgroups 3.11 was often bundled with MS-DOS 6.22
and was officially being supported until 2008.

That's why I think that these videos are just a rough indicator for trends.
The closer we look, the more questions arise.

The different sub versions are also often not being considered.
Things like Windows NT 3.5x or Windows 95 A/B/C and most importanly Windows 98 (FE) and Windows 98SE. They were very distinct in some ways.
Windows Me often wasn't being considered, either.

I know that sounds pendantic, but what if the video had compared Windows NT vs Windows 9x.
Or Windows NT vs DOS-based Windows (Windows 3.x plus Windows 9x with me)?
The bars would have looked different maybe.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-11-16, 00:39:

Hi, I agree that Windows XP got very popular.
But in gaming, Windows 98SE remained popular for a while.
I read about this in forums, though.

I'd prefer if we had some hard data regarding OS usage statistics from the time, but that seems to be difficult to track down nowadays.

One thing to consider is that mainstream (not extended) support for Win98 ended in 2002. This, along with the aforementioned WinXP SP1 availability, is what likely prompted a lot of PC gamers to consider upgrading. As for Win95, its extended support ended in 2001, and you couldn't install DirectX 9 on it, so I doubt many gamers kept using it after that.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-16, 07:02:

I'd prefer if we had some hard data regarding OS usage statistics from the time, but that seems to be difficult to track down nowadays.

Me, too. I merely was a casual gamer/2D gamer, though, so I can't say much about it.
If at all, Windows 98SE held a certain popularity among single-processor/core systems, of course.
Something along the lines of Pentium II/III, Pentium IV and AMD Athlon (single core).
Some graphics cards such as the ATI Rage Fury MAXX required 9x for proper AGP support.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-16, 07:02:

One thing to consider is that mainstream (not extended) support for Win98 ended in 2002. This, along with the aforementioned WinXP SP1 availability, is what likely prompted a lot of PC gamers to consider upgrading.

Hm. We basically just got Windows 98SE in 2000. Ending it in 2002 would been bit short, I think.
And Windows XP got stable with SP1, better SP2..
The turning point in my memory was closer to 2004, I think.
But that was probably a local phenomenon, not sure.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-16, 07:02:

As for Win95, its extended support ended in 2001, and you couldn't install DirectX 9 on it, so I doubt many gamers kept using it after that.

Right. By turn of century, Windows 95 felt like an artifact of history already.
Something to run on a 486 from before the information age.

Windows 98SE by contrast was still current, though. It was just released in late '99, after all.
It did well were I live until 2003. About that's when casual PC users noticed this newfangled "Windows XP".

From 2004 onwards, I had to assist many 98SE or Me to XP transitions.
Gratefully, SP2 was out by then, which added a very useful software Firewall.

But these things are maybe different around the globe.
Let's take DVD, for example. Nowadays, I always read online it was from 1996/1997 and replaced VHS in an instant.
In reality, where I live, it wasn't a thing until 2002. That's when DVD rental stores opened.
At home, we continued to record on VHS up until 2005 or so.

In addition, Super VCDs were important by turn of century.
Cover discs on magazines had SVCD compatible format or stored MPEGs or WMVs (or oldschool AVIs).
Some acquaintances were into rips, too. They cared about DIVX/xviD etc.

In early 90s, we too had a small market for VCDs in our country (authentic releases). Or maybe Europe, in general, not sure.
VCDs were always niche, but some 90s game consoles and Windows 3.1x PCs or Mac could play them.
To this day, the vintage VCD releases appear on eBay from time to time.
Not the Asian copies of famous films, but the official VCD releases of early 90s.
In other parts of the world, such as the US, QuickTime CDs and Movie CD format were more common than VCD, it seems.

Edited.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-11-16, 09:10:

Hm. We basically just got Windows 98SE in 2000. Ending it in 2002 would been bit short, I think.

Just to clarify, Microsoft officially ended mainstream support for Win98 in 2002. Extended support lasted until 2006.

This is documented on several of Microsoft's archived support pages. Like here for example.

I always found that old 2002 XP PC to be sluggish. I would have tried Win98 SE on it, but I wasn't confident about changing the OS back then. With poor GeForce4 MX 440, which could only do D3D7, I doubt games gained much. Though some wanted XP in some way or another. I learned decades later Call of Duty 2 doesn't have any specific API requirements, and you can copy it to Win98 SE, but it crashes out of box because of weird non-default values for stack size in EXE header. Apparently, those old Windows versions can't resize the stack at runtime. At least that's how I understood.

I could only try it in virtual machine with one of those slow software D3D DLLs after modifying stack values to what Visual C++ would set by default, so it ran at 1 FPS maybe. So it would run on Win98 in theory, but couldn't try on real hardware.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-11-16, 09:25:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-11-16, 09:10:

Hm. We basically just got Windows 98SE in 2000. Ending it in 2002 would been bit short, I think.

Just to clarify, Microsoft officially ended mainstream support for Win98 in 2002. Extended support lasted until 2006.

This is documented on several of Microsoft's archived support pages. Like here for example.

True. That doesn't contradict with the fact that the US-English Windows 98SE was freshly released in May 5th 1999 (localized version in my country in June 10th '99).

Windows XP was from October 25th 2001, which was at the very end of 2001.
In practice, it wasn't really available in masses until early 2002.

So I don’t think that existing Windows 98SE users had nothing better to do
than to instantly storm the PC stores and buy a shrinkwrapped copy of XP.

Especially since not all existing software/hardware was fully compatible from the get go.
From my memory, Windows XP had been questioned at first.
People were sceptical about the Luna theme or the product activation.

Where I live, XP started to be adopted on a larger scale beginning with SP2 (released 2004).
SP1 was released in September 2002 (the last 3,5 months of 2002; so 2003 basically) and considered the minimum version to be mature.

Again, where I live. Can't speak for whole world, of course.
I've spent the early-mid 2000s helping installing people XP on hopelessly underpowered Windows 9x PCs.
The RAM and the small HDD were main issue at the time, if memory serves.

I don't upgrade my windows OS until after of near when support has ended as updates always seem to brake something. I was on XP up until this past summer. I never ran into problems with it. there's a fan made version of chrome that's something like chrome version 138 that works fine with modern websites.

Right now I'm using windows 10 with the windows 95 shell and tools/apps modded into it. surprisingly it's not buggy at all using the 95 explorer outside of 2 issues I wasn't able to fix, cut and pasting files doesn't always work deeper in the filesystem and the display properties tab for monitors resolutions gives errors for any unused display.

there's also one core api that lets you run a lot of modern apps on xp, it's kinda like kernelEx for 9x.

unluckybob wrote on 2025-11-16, 16:20:

there's also one core api that lets you run a lot of modern apps on xp, it's kinda like kernelEx for 9x.

Hi, yes, you're right.

To my knowledge, there's KernelEx (Win 9x), One Core API (Win XP), Extended Kernel for Windows Vista (Win Vista) and VxKex (Win 7).

For legal reasons I can't say much about them, though. No links etc.
I think it's good to have a few original copies of Windows around before using them, also.
To my knowledge KernelEx doesn't need Windows Me files (just free unicows.dll and gdiplus.dll),
but One Core API and up may involve system files borrowed from the next higher version(s).
So having them is good to be on the safe side (just in case). ^^

PS: Sorry for talking so much. I'll try to be quieter now.

I'm allergic to extended kernels. People working on them should do something useful with their lives instead. Leave the OS kernels to the pros.

kernel extensions useless and not legal 😆 what are you guys on? what's next back porting .net is bad too.

Just try posting any links, moderator will be quickly on your tail. I once got a thread locked for posting about, uhm, questionable Counter-Strike port. Even so, it's evident US is powerless when it comes to Russia's illegal activities concerning US intellectual property.

unluckybob wrote on 2025-11-16, 20:00:

kernel extensions useless and not legal 😆 what are you guys on? what's next back porting .net is bad too.

Without looking into it in more detail, it seems safe to assume kernel extensions are not legal. Using Windows without a valid license is copyright infringement which is illegal. Kernel extensions at a minimum probably violates the license. If modified versions of Windows components are being distributed, then that on its own would be copyright infringement too.

As for its utility, I guess that is subjective. Personally I don't see much sense in trying to make modern unmodified software run on vintage operating systems for which it was not intended - that just sounds like unending work for what will probably always be a reduction in functionality, reliability and security. Porting software is another matter - if you're doing that then there shouldn't be any need to modify the operating system.

davidrg wrote on 2025-11-16, 21:31:

Without looking into it in more detail [..]

The fewest do.
Explains the stereotype of macOS users, among other things. 😀
(There are many statements about the Mac platform made by people who have never used a Mac.)

davidrg wrote on 2025-11-16, 21:31:

[..]it seems safe to assume [..]

KernelEx seems okay. In recent versions it patches stuff in memory, no file hacking.

davidrg wrote on 2025-11-16, 21:31:

As for its utility, I guess that is subjective.

Absolutely.

davidrg wrote on 2025-11-16, 21:31:

Kernel extensions at a minimum probably violates the license.

The Microsoft EULA itself violates national law in certain countries..
So it's all relative, maybe. Everyone better double check how situation is in the own place.

davidrg wrote on 2025-11-16, 21:31:

Personally I don't see much sense in trying to make modern unmodified software run on vintage operating systems for which it was not intended - that just sounds like unending work for what will probably always be a reduction in functionality, reliability and security. Porting software is another matter - if you're doing that then there shouldn't be any need to modify the operating system.

Each to his own, I guess. It makes sense to me, at very least.
The world has turned further -25 years, a quarter of a century have passed- and applications originally written for older OSes lost support in newer versions because the current compilers and frameworks available nolonger supported them.
These Kernel extensions restore compatibility that once existed with such applications
and still had remained at core (such as using *.ini file in application folder or using a global setting or using plain GDI/GDI+).

Also, there are practical reasons.
Windows XP supports things such as MPU-401 or DirectMusic compatible software synthesizers (Virtual Sound Canvas 3, S-YXG50 etc).
Newer games that still use MIDI could merely use these softh synths on old XP 32-Bit and nothing later.
Provided they could run on XP 32-Bit, still.

Then there's direct hardware i/o.
On Windows 9x it is possible to access hardware directly, and 98SE/Me are the last of its kind here.
Stuff like prototype ISA cards or a homebrew PTT interface cables for a ham radio transceiver.
They do bit-bang serial or parallel port pins, in short.

On Windows XP, it requires PortTalk driver or applications written for Port.dll to make that work.
And it doesn't always work, depending on the situation.
Making Windows 98SE work with modern compilers or software will allow applications to continue in the old fashion of directly talking to hardware.

But these are just my two cents, of course. Each to his own.

PS: Pardon for another reply. I'll now go to bed, I'll promise. Good night everyone. 😴

PS/2: But I agree on one thing: That Windows 10 should never get a kernel extension.
It simply doesn't deserve one. IMHO.

UCyborg wrote on 2025-11-16, 20:20:

Just try posting any links, moderator will be quickly on your tail. I once got a thread locked for posting about, uhm, questionable Counter-Strike port. Even so, it's evident US is powerless when it comes to Russia's illegal activities concerning US intellectual property.

sounds like tin foil hat talk