I would say, that Socket 939 is as big overkill for DOS gaming as LGA 775... And for Socket 939, I don't know about Win 98 compatibility, so I won't help you with this.

Regarding mentioned Conroe board, well, let's say, that you should prepare yourself for same situation as with V4 4500. That board it's quite rare, and when it appears, it's usually going for eye-watering price. When I was building my PC, it was the first board, which I wanted to use as foundation for that PC. I ended up loosing in bidding war to a guy, who at the end paid 121€ for that board. 121€! I paid less for my brand new Z270 board used in my current main rig... At the end I went with 4CoreDual, for which I paid 20€, and I'm happy with that decision.

I don't want to scare you, just be prepared, that even tho some of these parts are old, in some circles they are still very valuable to a point, that normal people are not willing to pay its asking prices.

S939 and S754 with a VIA chipset are confirmed good with Win98. I've actually installed Win98 on an AM2 board using the K8T890 chipset, although the Realtek drivers for the onboard ethernet were problematic, so it's not a build I kept around.

For Intel, I'm specifically recommending the 865 chipset (or earlier) over 915 or newer because vendor drivers are still available, DOS continues to work on it with some sound cards, and it's AGP so you have more options for supported video cards. Unfortunately, S775 boards with the 865 chipset are more uncommon (hence more expensive). S478 might be the better way to go.

Having excess CPU horsepower is actually a really good thing. For instance, it allows you to run games using nGlide with performance in excess of the V5-5500. With Athlon64 chips that can be downclocked, there really is no disadvantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-w1NziFoLg

I can get the 4coreDual for 50 EUR at this ebay auction: https://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/ASRock-4CoreDual … W8AAOSwvg9XfO3L

It will work correctly with my E6600 and the dual core nature of the CPU won't be a problem for win98SE?

Alternatively I could by this bundle with a cedar mill CPU and HSF: https://www.benl.ebay.be/itm/RARE-Asrock-4Cor … 2MAAOSwUYNaOkd4

That questions been asked so many times by so many people. If you generally want to know the answer multi core has no effect on 9x. The OS will only see 1 CPU. But anyone could tell you that I mean almost anyone knows this.

It is my understanding that Hyperthreading needed to be disabled, so I thought that was also the case for a multicore CPU. So generally speaking an E6600 (or higher) CPU should be a tremendous (overkill) CPU that would function perfectly, generally speaking. The PT880 chipset in the 4CoreDual should do it, according to this article, even though it's not always stable during boot: http://www.flaterco.com/kb/W98.html

Hyperthreading is a virtual processor, Hypertrheading is 1 CPU and 1 virtual CPU that is exposed through the BIOS to the operating system as a logical processor. I have personally never heard of anyone having to disable HT. But I can believe that there is bugs in the implementation of HT that causes problems. Those Bugs could be related to the fact that HT is not multiprocessing and is more of a gimmick to allow a single core processor to to multitask better under multi threaded applications.

So what you are talking about may or may not be a thing, it may only apply to certain motherboards, or certain bios revisions, and how they are implemented causing bugs. The bug is related to HT not being true multicore in that it is not. That has nothing to do with windows 98 not being Multithreaded and everything to do with the CPUs them self as being Junk that was being cooked up by intel to compete with AMD at the time who was destroying them who actually had real Multicores that were using hyper transport at the time.

Later Intel released the Pentium D, where they glued two P4s to the substrate and did away with hyperthreading, but even the XEON CPUs that were essentially Glued P4s with Hypertheading still enabled. This was still not enough to compete with AMD because P4 is a bad architecture. It wasn't until Conroe and core 2 came out that intel could compete with AMD at the time.

Like the Intel Linage should be somthing like

P3<Pentium M<Conroe<Core 2<Core I3,I4,I7 and so on.

Pentium 4<Pentium HT<Pentium D (Canceled) Junk Bad design

I think I just bought an "overkill" steal through Ebay for 90 dollars:

"- Old school white ATX case
- Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 2.6 Ghz dualcore CPU
- 512Mb DDR Ram
- Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Motherboard
- Nvidia Geforce MX440 AGP GPU
- 40GB IDE hard drive
- Boots on Windows XP
- 1x CD/DVD Reader+Burner, 1x DVD Reader, 1x floppy disk drive"

I think I'll use this as a basis and:
- With a floppy emulator: just a cheap one from ebay/aliexpress for 25 EUR?
- Fast SSD storage: just a basic SATA SSD or special remarks, recommendations?
- GeForce 6800 (Ultra) AGP
- Perhaps change the case and/or PSU
- Add SBLive / Audigy (2)

With HT enabled, based on benchmarks and some games, it seems to split the cache in between the real and virtual core(s).

So in a system that only sees one core, it is going to be better having HT disabled.

There were also some strange problems that arose with certain software and games if HT was enabled back in the early days of XP.

So some things you would leave HT enabled and others you would disable HT, not only for strange issues, but also for performance sake.

As far as Core 2 based stuff for Win98SE, I have a setup running a C2D e8500 with a slight overclock because the board can only do a slight overclock due to no voltage adjustment whatsoever.
The video card is a 7900GTX.

I tried to use an 8800 Ultra with the modified drivers that supposedly support it, but it of course ended up having issues because it has more than 512MB RAM on the video card.

That ASrock board should give you a bit more flexibility as far as an the overall system goes.

Sounds like a good decision,
Windows 98se can handle more than 512 ram, but you should not install more than 512 ram before installing the OS.

You can patch the OS to handle more ram. Due to Bugs in the OS MS decided to shave some internal tables in the VMM rather than to actually fix the problem. Without patches you can only modify vcache settings in the system ini to limit the amount of vcache to so 98 doesn't hog up all of the virtual memory from over allocating it since it automatically does this proportionately to the amount of ram installed. Once you do that you can install like 1-1.4 gb of ram. After that windows 98se has a bug in the code that comes into play after 1.5 to 2gb of ram.

However this does not solve the memory allocation problem it is only limiting the vcache so software and drivers do not have memory overlap into the vram. To fix the problem you need to apply a 3rd party patch then you can use up to 4gb of ram on 98se. more info on the subjet https://msfn.org/board/topic/118097-day-to-da … than-1-gib-ram/

Anyone that tells you 98se only can use 512 ram either doesn't know what they are talking about or lying.

Warlord, negative on the options you've outlined. Win98 can be installed using HIMEMX to limit addressable RAM. The sequence is to boot with a Win98 boot disk, run the installer, then overwrite config.sys with a file that loads HIMEMX with the appropriate flag before completing the install. There's also a patch hanging around that enables HIMEMX in safe mode.

You can do that but I didn't give any options, other than to install with 512 then patch then add ram. You can use HIMEMX to install, then patch and remove HIMEMX. But I don't see any good reason to just use HIMEMX and do nothing. To me the last doesn't seem like a good option for someone intending to go for an overkill system.

You can use HIMEMX all the live long day. The only patch required is a small modification in MSDOS.SYS to use HIMEMX when booting to safe mode. It's small, but tricky to get right, and after hitting the wall with my NIC driver it was no longer a priority for me to resolve.

Rloew's patch is good, so I understand, but it's not the only way to skin the cat.

I understand that, but the point I was making for example is if I used HIMEMX I still can't allocate all of my ram. The point is making a system that is overpowered. If you want to allocate all of your ram on 98 cuz you got an OP system with 2gb or ram than theres only one way. If you have the money to dump on expensive retro parts off ebay like the OP has you have the money to get a patch for it.

Well, the thing is, that on today's market, you will most probably spend way more money on period correct Win 98 system, than on overpowered one.

Srandista wrote:

Well, the thing is, that on today's market, you will most probably spend way more money on period correct Win 98 system, than on overpowered one.

That is correct. I'm not interested in having all memory available for the OS to use, but it would be a good deal to be able to have it running in stable conditions with more than 512 MB plugged in.

Since I have this amazingly overpowered device now, I think I'll turn it into a dual boot Win XP / Win98SE machine.

ChAoS Overlord wrote:

Srandista wrote:

Well, the thing is, that on today's market, you will most probably spend way more money on period correct Win 98 system, than on overpowered one.

That is correct. I'm not interested in having all memory available for the OS to use, but it would be a good deal to be able to have it running in stable conditions with more than 512 MB plugged in.

Since I have this amazingly overpowered device now, I think I'll turn it into a dual boot Win XP / Win98SE machine.

Thats my point, you can run XP with 512ram but its too low of ram to run XP or windows 2000 properly. 512 is like the minimum system requirements of windows XP but the minimum system requirements for XP in real world practicle purposes is like 1gb. 2gb is the sweet spot to run XP. Forget running any games or using any browser like firefox or chrome on XP with 512 it will suck and in some cases of games it might not work at all. I have seen like firefox alone consume 2gb of ram just trying to play a youtube video.

So if you plan on dual booting with XP, since your computer is still capable enough to be a daily driver and useful with XP, than your going to want a lot more RAM then 512. That in turn is going to effect your system stability if you boot to 98. Trust me bro I have thought a lot of my advice I have been trying to give you fully through. I just haven't been so good at fully explaining why I come to my conclusions so fast.

Thank you all for your kind advice and committed comments. I'll let you know how things evolve, the struggles I'll be going through and I'm certain I'll be in need of advice in the near future. 😉 Now let's wait for all that stuff to come in! 😉

Some advice that may already be of interest to me:

If I'm to create a multiboot environment with Windows XP and Windows 98, what precautions should I take? Any insights on, Install order, boot loader, disk setup,...

I have acquired a very nice Sony Multiscan G500 today. Unfortunately the housing has been stained by smoking. What is the best way to clean it? Also I want to freshen up the tube itself. Just use a little damp cloth with water+vinegar or should I consider something else?

If anyone wants to correct me thats fine. It's been so long since I have done this I am just going off my instincts.

What I am going to say here is based on installing both OS on the same Hard drive. If you are using 2 separate hard drives you can ignore it. Because 98se has no problem reading primary partitions on 2nd physical disks.

Depends if you want to read the partition that windows XP is installed in or not from 98se. IF you just want to have 2 separate installations install 98se on the 1st primary. When you install XP make a 2nd primary and XP will install a bootloader to the 1st primary. In this scenario 98se cannot see the XP partition. XP can see 98 but 98 cant se XP. It's also been so long since I did this or tryed a 3rd party NTFS driver for 98se so I don't remember if the NTFS driver could circumvent 98 limitations..

Windows 98se does not necessarily have to be installed in a primary partition but the way to go about installing it in a logical partition is extremely convoluted. Because of that I am not going to explain this option to you. So we will skip this version of doing things.

If you want to be able to read the XP installation from 98se than XP has to be formatted fat32 and has to be installed in a logical partition . So install 98se 1st to a primary partition and create a logical drive and format it with fat 32. Then install XP to the logical drive. It should copy over its boot loader to the 98se Partition during setup.

You can ignore these ramblings.
I think this is right but over the years I have done this differently with 3rd part boot loaders like XOSL I have also run 98se from a logical drive while using those boot loaders. There are many ways you can dualboot XP and 98se. But the way I told you I bold think is the absolute simple way to do it.