As far as I know, there is no such animal. By the time WiFi cards were a thing the PC industry was completely onto Windows XP and 3.3v PCI. Your Pentium (to my knowledge) has 5v PCI slots. Only a bare few WLAN cards ever supported 9x at all.

The Cisco Aironet 350 PCI supports Win9x. We used those on Win98SE back in 1999-2002 (and maybe a little later also) But they only have 11 Mbit.

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collate … 0080088828.html

Maybe a PCI USB 2.0 adapter and a USB wi-fi stick would work? Assuming Win98 drivers for both of course.

There's already a thread about WiFi in Win98 on this forum, but as far as working with a P1, uncertain. Search the forums.

This way the OS and drivers only matter to a NIC.
.

PCBONEZ wrote:

This way the OS and drivers only matter to a NIC.
.

NIC-WIFI.JPG

Ahh, client bridge mode. I've done that on a couple routers running DD-WRT, but I've never had anything with stock firmware capable of doing that.

Sedrosken wrote:

Ahh, client bridge mode. I've done that on a couple routers running DD-WRT, but I've never had anything with stock firmware capable of doing that.

Don't see what firmware has to do with it.
The NIC needs a 9x driver then you set it's IP and protocol.
The router only cares about the IP and protocol and is blind to what the OS is.
.

I'm confused. It looks like you're trying to suggest to connect a regular wired NIC? Obviously it can be done, but the question, the way I understand it, was about connecting the PC wirelessly. Am I missing something?

I have used a wlan pci card in a socket 7 win98 system and I still have it somewhere at home.
If I can find it this evening then I will post it's specs.

dr_st wrote:

Am I missing something?

I don't think so, unless it's common sense. - The goal is clearly to use WIFI from a Pentium-1 with an open PCI slot running W9x.
The only W9x PCI card suggested so far only supports 802.11b which may or may not be compatible with his/her existing WIFI.
I provided an easy way to achieve the end goal with common parts most 'geeks' I know (or their buddy) would already have on-hand.
He can easily find a router that already works with the existing WIFI. That might not be so easy using W9x PCI cards.
And he could run several retro PCs through the router without futzing with WIFI setup for each PC individually.
.

A lot of Realtek wifi cards, USB and PCI, work in Windows 98SE. I used a USB RT73 and PCI RT2xx...something under 98SE. But if you want to have wifi under 98FE, or even DOS, 3.11 and 95, use PCI to PCMCIA adapter and Orinoco Gold card. It has only WEP security, but I use a Asus router, which has option to enable additional guest network, with WEP encoding, so it can be used with old computers.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Don't see what firmware has to do with it.
The NIC needs a 9x driver then you set it's IP and protocol.
The router only cares about the IP and protocol and is blind to what the OS is.

A bunch of routers I've seen lack the ability to connect to an existing WiFi network, so you can't use one+wired NIC to replace a wireless card. The way to go is to get an old cheap OpenWRT/DD-WRT capable wireless G router, install the custom firmware and be happy. Alternatively I've seen a D-Link WiFi extender (one of those you plug directly into the wall socket) that has an RJ-45 connection and can act as a WiFi client.

alexanrs wrote:

PCBONEZ wrote:

Don't see what firmware has to do with it.
The NIC needs a 9x driver then you set it's IP and protocol.
The router only cares about the IP and protocol and is blind to what the OS is.

A bunch of routers I've seen lack the ability to connect to an existing WiFi network, so you can't use one+wired NIC to replace a wireless card. The way to go is to get an old cheap OpenWRT/DD-WRT capable wireless G router, install the custom firmware and be happy. Alternatively I've seen a D-Link WiFi extender (one of those you plug directly into the wall socket) that has an RJ-45 connection and can act as a WiFi client.

It's easy to convert a wireless router to an access point. It's only a matter of settings. (So simple I don't even consider it a conversion, just a configuration.)
No new firmware required.
http://www.practicallynetworked.com/networkin … ccess_point.htm
http://www.tweaktown.com/guides/1575/using_an … oint/index.html
.

Oh no... this is different. These settings are for using a router as an AP - using the new router to create a secondary WiFi network and connect both routers through a wired network, What the OP wants is to connect both routers through WiFi and have the secondary one bridge wired connections into the main network. That is what many routers that do have those settings call "wireless bridge". OpenWRT does not give it special names AFAIR. you just set up a client wireless connection (which is what many routers do not allow) and disable DHCP.

I swear the early linksys cards supported it but I know positively that at least belkin's 802.11g pcmcia cards supported windows 98 and I bet that their pci adapters did too.

alexanrs wrote:

What the OP wants is to connect both routers through WiFi and have the secondary one bridge wired connections into the main network.

That's exactly what you can do with what I suggested.
That's how I had my previous residence setup.

At least the page you linked me states the following:

When the configuration is done, put the old router in place. Then connect an Ethernet cable between them, plugging into the regular Ethernet ports of each. Do not connect it to the old router's Internet/WAN port.

If he was to run a cable to the secondary router, he might just as well run a cable directly to the machine.

What about using ethernet NIC and some kind of wireless receiver? I remember installing that for connecting a ethernet printer to a wireless network.

Once you decide to go wired, your options are basically limitless. Because there is plenty of hardware there (routers, single-device access points, multi-device access points) that can function as a wireless bridge to an existing wireless router.