It has been a great second day for my first serious retro pc build (Only having the T5710 prior). It rocks the following specs for context:
GPU : 6800GT AGP 256mb
CPU : Athlon 64 X2 4200+
Motherboard : ASUS A8V (Via chipset)
RAM : 4GB DDR from Kingston
HDD: 300GB
Sound: YMF744
Where yesterday was trying to get XP and 98 stable day, today was the dual boot day.
Yesterday when installing 98 i also prepared the machine with the BootIt boot manager although naturally the boot sector had been overwritten by 98.
One bootit reinstall later and i could make the XP profile. Installed XP over USB trough a Windows PE desktop and a utility that can copy the XP setup to the C: drive. Went smoothly at first but then got a hal.dll is missing error on the second boot. Yet another BootIt reinstall later and the XP setup continued.
For XP i also experimented with some drivers this time round. A older Nvidia Omega driver, the latest official driver. And an NGO Nvidia driver.
The nvidia omega driver had great compatibility in the old build of Half-Life 2 and ran great in UT2004. 3Dmark2001 ran in the 17000 range. Roughly the same performance i get in Win98.
The latest official driver ran 3Dmark in the 20000 range but Half-Life 2 had a lot of missing textures once again proving that running the latest drivers for retro projects is a bad idea.
Finally the NGO driver, this one combined the best of both worlds. I still have to bench the latest omega driver and then i can see which one i like best between the two. (The modded drivers are advertised to have visual and compatibility improvements but i mostly find them interesting because of the following they had in this 2005 era).
So right now this retro time machine project has 3 modes you can seamlessly boot between without altering any settings or on the hardware configuration.
Windows XP mode : No special tweaks here other than the modded nvidia driver. It has access to 3,5GB of ram and both cores.
Windows 98 mode : Doesn't support dual core so automatically runs single core. HimemX is used in config.sys to cap the memory to 512MB. I used the 77.72 driver for the nvidia card here. Notably i am not sure if its fully using AGP here but i don't have anything to complain about in terms of stability and performance. No shutdown bug, no bluescreens, no weird hangs for the most part. The only notable issue is with MSDos games. I need to alt + enter to get full screen games to run. If they initialize fullscreen themselves it wont show anything.
MSDos Mode : Activated by choosing Reboot To MSDos in 98 and then choosing 98 in bootit. This one has my custom autoexec and config.sys tweaks. I also made profiles for cpuspd to quickly switch to 8086, 368, 468 or full speed modes. HimemX is used here to to keep the ram within save limits but other memory managers are availible.
Dos right now leaves a bit to be desired, with some games working flawlessly and some hanging the system.
All in all a great weekend with what is rapidly becoming a great time machine build. Soon ill try more operating systems like OS/2, Windows 10 and a Amiga/Linux hybrid.