After a lot of testing, it looks as though Win98FE beta build 1693 is the last version to play nice with 4 floppy drives and CDROM. Which is promising, since this is a release candidate.
I'm going to see if I can get this to work with Win98FE (Retail), and possibly also Win98SE.
-Brian
I have good news - I think I got this to work Win98SE! Based on my cursory testing, no errors yet.
I'm still having issues getting the Retail version of Win98FE to install successfully on my test machine. But, considering that I heavily-based this patch on build 1693, I'd imagine it will work fine there.
I need to clean-up the patch, before it's ready to share. Once I've done that, I'm going to see if WinME is possible.
-Brian
Great work Brian...
😉
bbuchholtz wrote on 2025-11-30, 07:29:I have good news - I think I got this to work Win98SE! Based on my cursory testing, no errors yet. […]
I have good news - I think I got this to work Win98SE! Based on my cursory testing, no errors yet.
I'm still having issues getting the Retail version of Win98FE to install successfully on my test machine. But, considering that I heavily-based this patch on build 1693, I'd imagine it will work fine there.
I need to clean-up the patch, before it's ready to share. Once I've done that, I'm going to see if WinME is possible.
-Brian
Nice work! Please let us know what changes were required once you confirm all is sorted
Here's the patch. It's targeted for Win98SE, but it should also work with Win98FE. When you examine the contents, you will see that I'm overlaying the VMM32 and IOSUBSYS aspects of the OS. Given that this is a low-level system of the OS, IOS.VXD and VMM32.VXD are dependencies for many functions. I basically had to replace much of IOS to keep everything version-level.
Please note, I've done only a limited amount of testing. As such, I welcome any feedback on improving this. There were a few files I was unsure about: BIGMEM.DRV, MRCI2.VXD and QEMMFIX.VXD. For now, the patch will not update these files. But, you will find alternate versions from Win98SE beta build 1693. In particular, I'm leaning towards MRCI2.VXD may need to be patched. I'd be curious to hear your results of testing this.
I've been in the habit of disabling ACPI, when installing Windows 98. It helps free-up resources for lower-end machines. And plays nicer with modern hardware. For those of you not familiar with this switch, you install like this:
setup.exe /p i
Yes, there is a space between "p" and "i".
I did some poking around in WinME. I think too many changes were made to IOS for this type of approach to be practical. I'll continue to investigate. But, I was never a big user of WinME and am satisfied with having Win98SE. So, it's likely someone else will need to carry the WinME torch...
-Brian
[REMOVED FILE]
I've made another breakthrough. I learned how to decompress VMM32.VXD. This allowed me to greatly optimize the patch for Win98. The patch now needs only four files. It should now play nice with other system updates, including Service Packs.
This new approach is looking to be viable for WinME. As you can see from the screenshot, I'm making good progress! I'll post a patch for WinME, when I have things in a stable state.
I'm going to clean-up file attachments, in other posts, to help prevent confusion. This attachment is the most current patch for Win98.
-Brian