JidaiGeki: I had to give up on getting an x1950pro AGP card working under 2k, so I would imagine any of the HD series of cards would be impossible or at least a terrible pain to get working with 98

ODwilly wrote:

JidaiGeki: I had to give up on getting an x1950pro AGP card working under 2k, so I would imagine any of the HD series of cards would be impossible or at least a terrible pain to get working with 98

That's exactly why I had official support in mind and didn't want to experiment that much.

tincup wrote:

Yep, it's a nice rig..

Thanks!

JidaiGeki wrote:

Love it! Really versatile setup, and your build is very clean too 😀 your family will love it 😉

Just picked up an ASROCK 775 with AGP board myself, the 4Core Dual SATA, waiting for it to arrive at the moment. Focusing on XP gaming though.

If you do go down the XFX 7950 route, just be aware that the cooler needs to be watched carefully, it's a common point of failure and when it goes it takes the board with it. I bought one new and this happened to me several years ago - by the time I made a warranty claim XFX's distributor could only give me a GT240 PCI-E as a replacement 🙁 have a couple of Radeon AGP 3850s but I can only imagine that driver support under Win98 would be a right pain.

Thank you 😀
I had a 4core Dual VSTA 7 years ago. It was an OK motherboard, considering the hybrid memory and graphics subsystem options it gave to you. But no official Win98 support. If no Win98 support is needed, then I personally would go straight to XP with i3 Sandybridge/Ivybridge, 4+ GB RAM and some of the latest graphics cards. 😉

Added a USB 3.0 --> USB 2.0 adapter cable, to be able to use the USB 3.0 front port as USB 2.0 on this motherboard.

ATI on Windows 2000 courtesy of BlackWingCat
http://blog.livedoor.jp/blackwingcat/archives/571484.html

Hi,
I'm just experimenting with Win98SE on GIGABYTE GA-P67-DS3-B3 (intel P67 PCH chipset) and after some SATA issues I was able to make clean install and also run my existing installation. Did someone else here tried W98 on such new MB?
I posted to MSFN thread: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/97588-modern- … s-98/?p=1111765

I tried something like this aways back. it did not come out good. windows 98 is a pain with more then 1gb of ram. Nice system by the way.

>1GB RAM is no pain, it can be simply solved by himemx.exe /MAX=1024k XMS & MaxPhysPage limit in system init - 0$ solution or you can buy a commercial memory patch from R. Loew and then utilizie ~2GB of RAM 😀
More limiting is missing drivers for modern VGAs (only VBEMP as VESA fallback is avialable), audio, ethernet, USB, SATA...
I was able to solve driver problem with Realtek 8111E by installing realmode NDIS2 driver that works fine, just maybe it has less speed than native 32b driver would have but still getting ~750kB/s - enough for common browsing...

Or just get (buy) RLOEW's memory patch. $20 and you can run almost any ram configuration with W98 - I dual boot XP/W98 with 4gb right now. I've heard some people run into problems, but not me so far.

tincup wrote:

mid range XP and low spec W8

But not for games, for wich it's low end for XP if to take into account how long XP games were released and what requirements they had later. And nothing for games wich need W7-8 to run. But if Win98 games work good - the idea is reasonable to have Win98 machine wich supports XP games as long as possible.
If that machine also had ISA slot or SB chip working as ISA card - this would be wunderbar. Anyway, the CPU is not bad to run DOS stuff in DOSBox.

and plug in a 7900GTX/512mb with the unofficial modded W98 drivers floating around out there...

And get risk to reduce compatibility with Win98 games.

Tertz wrote:

the idea is reasonable to have Win98 machine wich supports XP games as long as possible.
If that machine also had ISA slot or SB chip working as ISA card - this would be wunderbar. Anyway, the CPU is not bad to run DOS stuff in DOSBox.

That is not possible, and we try to be realistic here, sorry.
And the idea building that machine was not that. My sister played flawlessly her favorite 2014 game into Windows 8.1: The Sims 4. Also, all her past favorite games, also into Windows 8.1.

So, the idea was to have a single PC for the vast majority o Win 9x - XP and some newer games, and not to fill the entire place with tons of PC's, KVM stuff etc etc.

Tertz wrote:

and plug in a 7900GTX/512mb with the unofficial modded W98 drivers floating around out there...

And get risk to reduce compatibility with Win98 games.

Correct, this is certainly not a "one-stop" W98 rig. But simply one that is capable of running XP full-force *and* W98 games that benefit from the extra horsepower. In practice this mostly means heavily modded late gen W98 games at very high hi-res [European Air War come to mind]. So the risk is all up front - no illusions it's the perfect home for all W9x stuff.

GeorgeMan wrote:

So, the idea was to have a single PC for the vast majority o Win 9x - XP and some newer games, and not to fill the entire place with tons of PC's, KVM stuff etc etc.

I thought that WAS the idea for most of us here 😉
I like the system a lot though, good job

Something with that wide OS support is not meant to play every single game you throw to it, by definition. :p

Thanks!

Sorry, meant I thought the idea was to fill the room with PC's (He says with 3 P3's, 2 486's when really 1 P3 would do everything I want retro wise)
..basically I was being a smart ass

chinny22 wrote:

Sorry, meant I thought the idea was to fill the room with PC's (He says with 3 P3's, 2 486's when really 1 P3 would do everything I want retro wise)
..basically I was being a smart ass

Funny you mentioned this as a joke, but if I had the space I would really fill a room with PCs xD

tincup wrote:

Or just get (buy) RLOEW's memory patch. $20 and you can run almost any ram configuration with W98 - I dual boot XP/W98 with 4gb right now. I've heard some people run into problems, but not me so far.

20$ for a patch that let you use 2GB of ram under win98? That's bull&@>%!. I know it's his work and he has the right to charge whatever he wants for it, but I wouldn't pay more than 5$ for something like that. If I made like 3000$ / month, yeah, sure, maybe I would consider it - but for 20$ you can get real hardware.

You can just make a ramdisk that uses 1 to 1.5gb of ram and have 1gb or 512mb available for win98 - and that will only cost you some time. That way you can run win98 with 2gb of ram or more physically installed so newer OSes can benefit from the extra ram, and have the ramdisk used as SWAP witch should speed up the system. And again, it's free.

For my socket 939 V2 SLI rig I made a 1.5Gb ramdisk under dos (using the autoexec/config files win98 runs during startup) with the help of a utility provided on the win98 startup diskette, so win98 only has 512MB of ram available, witch is more than enough. This way I can have 2GB in XP and run win98 w/o issues.

kanecvr wrote:

20$ for a patch that let you use 2GB of ram under win98? That's bull&@>%!. I know it's his work and he has the right to charge whatever he wants for it, but I wouldn't pay more than 5$ for something like that. If I made like 3000$ / month, yeah, sure, maybe I would consider it - but for 20$ you can get real hardware.

The biggest question here is how irrelevant this patch is. Most people running Windows 98 do so on retro machines, to run old games. Anything ever designed for 98 was released back when having over 512MB of RAM as a luxury not even most OEM XP machines came bundled with, and nothing you need Windows 98 to run optimally will take advantage of it (unless you decide to go trigger happy with multitasking).
I used to be active at MSFN many years ago, when RLOEW was releasing his patches. I remember people there still trying to cling to Windows 98 as their main OS somewhat late in the XP era. That is when stuff like KernelEx and the memory patch had some real demand (still a niche thing, though). I remember some clashing between the people behind freeware projects like KernelEx and people trying to charge for their work like RLOEW. I believe RLOEW was also the first to break the 137GB barrier in Windows 98 (and charged for it), then another developer created a free alternative. But now? Windows 98 struggles on the Internet, has no drivers for modern hardware, most modern software doesn't work, isn't very stable, etc. The real demand is gone and the majority of people running Windows 98 are us, retro enthusiasts, to whom his patches have VERY limited appeal. We are not trying to make Windows 98 a modern OS, we are using it to run old stuff. So besides some very specific cases, we have little need for stuff like this. Native USB flash drive support and networking updates are still great because it makes moving stuff from our modern machines to our retro rigs much more convenient, but I don't think I even bothered to install KernelEx in ANY of my retro machines because I have no use for it.

kanecvr wrote:

20$ for a patch that let you use 2GB of ram under win98? That's bull&@>%!. I know it's his work and he has the right to charge w […]
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tincup wrote:

Or just get (buy) RLOEW's memory patch. $20 and you can run almost any ram configuration with W98 - I dual boot XP/W98 with 4gb right now. I've heard some people run into problems, but not me so far.

20$ for a patch that let you use 2GB of ram under win98? That's bull&@>%!. I know it's his work and he has the right to charge whatever he wants for it, but I wouldn't pay more than 5$ for something like that. If I made like 3000$ / month, yeah, sure, maybe I would consider it - but for 20$ you can get real hardware.

You can just make a ramdisk that uses 1 to 1.5gb of ram and have 1gb or 512mb available for win98 - and that will only cost you some time. That way you can run win98 with 2gb of ram or more physically installed so newer OSes can benefit from the extra ram, and have the ramdisk used as SWAP witch should speed up the system. And again, it's free.

For my socket 939 V2 SLI rig I made a 1.5Gb ramdisk under dos (using the autoexec/config files win98 runs during startup) with the help of a utility provided on the win98 startup diskette, so win98 only has 512MB of ram available, witch is more than enough. This way I can have 2GB in XP and run win98 w/o issues.

Believe me, the more RAM you have, the bigger the issues get.
I'm not a novice in computers, I actually work as IT Support engineer in a big company, but this problem in conjuction with 2+ gigs of RAM had started to get in my a$$!
I could have the computer running stably under Windows 98SE, but anything 3D just couldn't load. As if the 6800 Ultra's memory was not initialized!
After days, and I mean days of searching, trying different settings, etc etc, I just tried the patch (that runs for a limited time), run it and solved instantly my problem. Hassle-free. So I decided to buy it and even if I don't use it nowadays as I have disassembled that PC, it's always useful to have it for future reference.

Again, just to repeat myself, I use the RLOWE patch so that I can run 98 side by side with a full bore XP build, and for me that's a good thing. Yes we all build normal W9x boxes - I have several others that fit specific needs noted elsewhere. But this fire breather allows running highly modded/hi-res W98 era games smooth as silk. It's not a period purity issue.

XP/W98 make good roommates in this respect and saves on valuable space and money by not having to maintain a maxed-out Tualatin class build in addition to the XP box - the double duty has saved quite a bit of bakshish here. So for $20 I'm not complaining - I don't want to sound all richy-rich but this is the price we gladly pay around here for our cherished old controllers, sound cards, boards and all manner of parts. It might irritate some to have to pay for what most enthusiasts would have made public- but I'm not going to quibble with this one. Other people who have gone down a similar XP/98 path have seen the virtue of the patch too.

And as GeorgeMan says it can cut out *loads* of research time and wasted money testing various gear for compatibility. Personally I wish I'd purchased the patch earlier than I did.

What are the chances you could tell me your driver setup? Got a p similar build and am an idiot with drivers. (I just wanna play the vid games dang it!)