🤣 yeah, you need free IRQs before attempting this. That means go into bios and disable both serial ports, the parallel port, the onboard sound, the modem if it has one, and 75% of your USB ports. A lot of people never think about USB either but if you have more than 2 ports Id suggest disabling all but 2 ports or disabling usb entirely. You might want to try to set IRQ based on PCI slot if the bios lets you so you don't use up IRQ5. On my 865 chipset with 8 USB ports and USB 2.0. 98 will literally spread USB across all my IRQs making it aids. If I disable all but 2 ports and leave 2,0 enabled it only uses 1 irq, instead USB will use like 4 of my IRQs.
The issue is the sound card requires 3 IRQs. One IRQ for the main PCI part that should be 11 but it could be something else, and another IRQ for the emulation irq 5, that's why you disable the parallel port cuz parallel is usually 5 or 7 and an irq for the firewire usually any free IRQ ideally irq 3 or 4 from disabling the serial ports.. It also requires all of the DMA channels and addresses a normal sb16 would need.
That part does take a long time. On my Pentium M it took a couple minutes, so on a PIII or slower I can imagine it taking like 10 minutes, but not 8 hours. 8 hours there's some other problem. I'm not sure why it takes that long. You might want to try our advice and do it on a fresh install, after you installed chipset drivers and enabled DMA on the hard drive in the device manager. Without DMA enabled it even takes a pretty long time on my overpowered computer.
And yeah don't use those service packs they are aids. 98se can't be secured so the patches are stupid, they do nothing for gaming compatibility or boosting performance. All they do is make things slower.
Theres only a couple patches you actually need, like MSI installer update, and maybe tcpip 1.4 if you do a lot of networking, there are several patches for the tcp ip stack that actually do boost performance. Besides that sometimes some app might complain you need IE 5.5sp2 or higher to run or complain you need an updated version of visual C++ runtime to install or run or direct X but that's about it. NUSB can be installed separately if you use usb stuff.