Ahh, thanks for the writeup. Should definitely help should I need to resort to another build. And good to know a reccomendation on dos setups, i figured phils was the best for it's simplicity.

THE RAMDISK WORKED. Batch files and dos based anything works now! Thank you so much kanecvr and alexanrs!

Great guide KT7AGuy. Wish I had something like that when I set up my first "new" 98 machine a few years back.

I may be wrong, but most of the patches and hotfixes for 98se are a waste of time. All the fan made patches and fix packs I tried polluted the system with third party junk that ruined the nostalgic feel. I think the problem is that most were made by and for people still using 98 on their main PC way beyond official MS support.

What I wanted (but could never find) was just the official microsoft patches and hot fixes ONLY. Ideally you would have checkboxes for each and every fix/patch. That way you could avoid the stuff thats mostly pointless on modern 98 machines like DirectX 9, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.

These days after installing 98 the only unofficial patch I install is the Native USB Disk Driver (nusb33e.exe).

Nintendawg wrote:

These days after installing 98 the only unofficial patch I install is the Native USB Disk Driver (nusb33e.exe).

I do exactly he same 😀

rishooty wrote:

THE RAMDISK WORKED. Batch files and dos based anything works now! Thank you so much kanecvr and alexanrs!

I glad I could be of help !

Regarding fat32 partition size - I tried making large fat32 partitions the way you guys recommended, and it worked - until I tried to copy stuff on it. I'm using a pretty new machine (socket 939) with support for drives up to 1.5tb, so that's not an issues. As soon as I created the 160gb partition (selected 100% in fdisk on a 160gb ide hdd) windows 98 started bugging me about scanning drive F (the one I just made) - claiming the LAST sector of drive F cannot be read. Also random data corruption occurs. I'm using win98se

Did you install a 48-bit LBA patch? If you did not, it WILL corrupt data whenever it tires to write beyond the 127GB mark. 120GB and below should be safe even unpatched.
This is a good starting point to read about using larger HDDs in Windows 98: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/129027-big-hd … a-thread-index/

I did not. I'll install one when I get the chance.

Alright here are my ram settings. I maxed vcache and ramdisk to their highest recommended values that aren't known to cause any issues. And of course, MaxPhysPage and AGP Aperture are a matter of trial and error. Might push MaxPhysPage higher just to see what happens, I always got my linux usb to fix things if it goes wrong.

AGP Aperture 256MB
Config.sys

1DEVICE=C:\WINDOWS\HIMEM.EXE /NUMHANDLES=64 /VERBOSE
2INSTALL=C:\WINDOWS\XMSDSK.EXE 524288 E: /C1 /T /Y ; 512mb ramdisk

System.ini

1MaxPhysPage=48000 ; 1150mb usable ram;
2PagingDrive=E:
3MinPagingFileSize=513264
4MaxPagingFileSize=513264
5ChunkSize=4096

Gotta say, it runs pretty darn fast.

Also yeah, I notice most of the patches are for very arbitrary things. Really that's why I only went with Unofficial SP 3.50, NUSB, SE2ME, Revolutions Pack, and what's necessary for 48-Bit LBA and high ram. All I really wanted was anything that could make it more stable, perform better, or a bit more controllable. I completely agree, a more rolled up and customizable pack of essentials would be nice. Of course we have unofficial SP, but you can't exactly pick from it's main install, only it's extras.

Nintendawg wrote:

Great guide KT7AGuy. Wish I had something like that when I set up my first "new" 98 machine a few years back.

Thank you for the kind words. I'm going to polish it a bit more and then create a new thread about Win98SE install guides. Hopefully others will post their own so we can all compare.

Nintendawg wrote:

I may be wrong, but most of the patches and hotfixes for 98se are a waste of time.

I don't think you're wrong. You're probably right. I still use USP v2.1a out of habit. I never had any problems with it.

Nintendawg wrote:

All the fan made patches and fix packs I tried polluted the system with third party junk that ruined the nostalgic feel. I think the problem is that most were made by and for people still using 98 on their main PC way beyond official MS support.

For unofficial SPs newer than v2.1a, I agree. They're for people who want to use Win98SE as a viable OS. For folks that just want to play old games, v2.1a or nothing at all is best.

Nintendawg wrote:

What I wanted (but could never find) was just the official microsoft patches and hot fixes ONLY.

Well then, I've got just what you need! Check out this thread for more details. That link is to an ISO of the Microsoft Windows Security Update CD from February 2004 that had all the patches, etc. It installs just the patches and IE6, if I remember right.

Nintendawg wrote:

Ideally you would have checkboxes for each and every fix/patch. That way you could avoid the stuff thats mostly pointless on modern 98 machines like DirectX 9, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.

This is where you'll be disappointed, because there is no way to select this or that. It installs everything, or nothing.

I too really don't want IE6 in my Win98SE builds, and that renders the disc effectively useless to me. I was thinking of trying to modify that disc by replacing the installer for IE6 with a zero-byte file of the same name. In this fashion, I'm hoping that it will install everything except IE6. If this is successful, then unofficial SP v2.1a will no longer be useful to me. I would prefer to use the official MS update disc sans IE6. If my experiment is successful, it might also allow others to disable unwanted updates by also replacing them with zero-byte files.

I'll try it out later and report back with my results.

Nintendawg wrote:

These days after installing 98 the only unofficial patch I install is the Native USB Disk Driver (nusb33e.exe).

Really, that is probably the only truly necessary update.

Well, I guess that's just the thing. I didn't make this machine 100% for games. I also made it for experimentation with old OS's that i either grew up with(98) or have never known(dos). I've already backup my 98 partition for such purposes. But thanks all of you for your input, I'm definitely good for now 😀. And I've definitely found that USP 3.5(main/performance) and NUSB are really all that's needed, but hey now that I finally have a fully functioning and backed up machine I'll try some stuff out anyway. Bumping up MaxPhysPage, seeing what'll run with kernelex, so on. This gon be fun.

KT7AGuy wrote:

Nintendawg wrote:

What I wanted (but could never find) was just the official microsoft patches and hot fixes ONLY.

Well then, I've got just what you need! Check out this thread for more details. That link is to an ISO of the Microsoft Windows Security Update CD from February 2004 that had all the patches, etc. It installs just the patches and IE6, if I remember right.

Thanks for the handy link, just downloaded it. On the disc I see "Content\Win9x\Common\" which has WMP, IE6SP1, DirectX9b. So the idea of file replacement seems like a good one. Just need a clean way to break its ability to install those.

And good to hear you got things going nicely rishooty.

Great advice from KT7AGuy.
I used to always use the latest Unofficial Service Pack 3.x but, for my needs, decided that the Unofficial Service Pack 2.1a is sufficient. I normally just install the Main Updates and the Windows 2000 colour scheme (personal preference).
I have always used the USBSTACK.exe drivers that came with the Unofficial Service Pack 3.3x but, recently discovered that, for some reason, it causes my Sidewinder Force Feedback Steering Wheel (USB) not to be recognised in the Game Controllers control panel.

PS: My understanding has always been that the Unofficial Service Pack 2.1a's Main Updates was (largely) a combination of Microsoft's official patches and updates. Therefore, no need to install all those updates one by one.
But, I'm always open to try out other combinations of patches and updates.

Well, I modified the Microsoft Windows Security Update CD from February 2004 by replacing IE6, DirectX, and Media Player with zero-byte files. After launching, it bombed hard and threw an error about IE6. It appeared to do nothing else, but after rebooting it started installing some updates and bombed again, throwing errors about DirectX.

Did all the updates except for IE6, DirectX, and Media Player get installed? I have no idea, and I don't care because it didn't confirm any other updates' success. There are no log files or anything. I just can't trust it. I'll just stick to Unofficial SP v2.1a. It's been working fine for me for a very long time.

If anybody would like to try my modified version of the Update CD, just reply back and I'll upload it to my PogoPlug account for you.

The unmodified disc is still great for somebody who wants to install IE6, DX9, and WMP along with their updates.

Wouldn't it be easier to just create a simple EXE in C++ with an empty main() function? Those would be executed correctly, and should not make the installation abort.

alexanrs wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to just create a simple EXE in C++ with an empty main() function? Those would be executed correctly, and should not make the installation abort.

Sadly, I am not a programmer.

If you create what you suggest, wouldn't it then be possible to simply rename the executable to whatever is used for installing IE6, DX9, and WMP and replace those? If you'll create something like that I'll be happy to replace the executable files in the disc image and try it out again.

Interesting thread.
What can I do if the 384K between 640 and 1Mb are reserved due to the onboard gfx-chip of my nx6125 (x300 shared memory)

KT7AGuy wrote:

alexanrs wrote:

Wouldn't it be easier to just create a simple EXE in C++ with an empty main() function? Those would be executed correctly, and should not make the installation abort.

Sadly, I am not a programmer.

If you create what you suggest, wouldn't it then be possible to simply rename the executable to whatever is used for installing IE6, DX9, and WMP and replace those? If you'll create something like that I'll be happy to replace the executable files in the disc image and try it out again.

Can you replace the setup EXE with something that can still execute but not do anything? Like notepad.exe

dr.zeissler wrote:

Interesting thread.
What can I do if the 384K between 640 and 1Mb are reserved due to the onboard gfx-chip of my nx6125 (x300 shared memory)

The entire upper memory area? That seems a little unlikely, but even so, what makes you think that's a problem?

Why disable ACPI?

As it is unlikely that you will need any kind of power management on a Windows 98 machine (especially one you're probably only going to use for games and won't be leaving on all the time), it probably causes many more problems than it could possibly be worth.