The VT8237 SB is reported to work successfully in TDMA mode.

Edit: The K8V should be okay, although I think it's a bit limited in the number of PCI slots onboard. I anticipate it was also fairly affordable, which is nice.

nforce 3

For Windows, sure. For DOS, nforce 3 is the least compatible option.

The VT8237 SB is reported to work successfully in TDMA mode.

Then ASUS A8V Deluxe or ABIT AV8 would be good choise. Both socket 939.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

The VT8237 SB is reported to work successfully in TDMA mode.

Then ASUS A8V Deluxe or ABIT AV8 would be good choise. Both socket 939.

A8V has the VT8251 not VT8237. The former lacks DDMA from what I have gathered in the research I did so its not good for DOS or Win9x.

ASUS A8V Deluxe.

appiah4 wrote:

A8V has the VT8251 not VT8237. The former lacks DDMA from what I have gathered in the research I did so its not good for DOS or Win9x.

There's a risk of that, although I haven't run into any definitive sources confirming it. Do you know of any test data I can check out?

VT8251 came with PCI-E anyway, so it's not really that good for DOS/Win98 (video cards).

appiah4 wrote:

A8V has the VT8251 not VT8237. The former lacks DDMA from what I have gathered in the research I did so its not good for DOS or Win9x.

I've just looked this up and it appears that both the Deluxe and the regular (non-Deluxe) versions of the ASUS A8V have used the VT8237 southbridge chip, then again the VIA K8T800 chipset has the possibility for the use of either a VT8237 or a VT8251 southbridge so maybe the later revisions were equipped with the VT8251? I believe the one I have is the earlier revision with a VT8237, at least according to the last time I checked (I can always check again to make sure).

My a8v deluxe rev 2.0 southbridge chip says VT8237R and at least ymf724f-v pci card works in dos.

All retail a8v deluxe boards are marked as Rev 2.0 or more. Revision 1.0 boards were reserved for hardware reviewers and don't have AGP/PCI lock.

Baoran wrote:

My a8v deluxe rev 2.0 southbridge chip says VT8237R and at least ymf724f-v pci card works in dos.

Could you please clarify whether this required modified drivers and if you're using DDMA or DSDMA?

Thanks.

The page that I downloaded the driver from didn't say anything about them being modified. It loads both setupds.exe /s that seem to set address to 220, irq 5 and dma 1 and dsdma.exe after that in autoexec.bat. I have not fiqured out if I could change the irq to 7 somehow.

I also know that Asus A8V deluxe rev 1.02 was sold retail because I have that one too and it has VT8237 without R. Rev 2.0 was released several months after rev 1.02 in 2004.
Rev 1.02 also seems to be more commonly sold as used nowadays than rev 2.0.

Interesting, can it properly lock AGP and PCI with HT overclocking?

The Serpent Rider wrote:

Interesting, can it properly lock AGP and PCI with HT overclocking?

1.02 doesn't have AGP/PCI lock. That is why if you want to overclock you should try to find rev. 2.0.
Rev 2.0 motherboard also says VT8237 Rev A2 in the post screen, so I have always assumed that R in chipset model name meant that it is second revision of VT8237.

Ok, so the question for me at the moment is RAM. Is over 512MB too much for a 98SE/XP Dual Boot Socket 754? Can the setup work with 1GB, because I sure would like that. I will be running a Sempron 3000+ (just want a cool and quiet CPU) alongside a Radeon 9800 non-pro (or possibly a Radeon HD 4650 if I decide not to do the 98SE dual boot thing altogether.. in which case I may just go with 1.5GB or more..) .

I'm still not sure this PC needs to be Win9x anyway as it's mostly built for 2000-2004 games, and I'm sure it could easily run GOG copies of most DOS games just fine regardless..

I don't know what affects it but you can run win98se with 1Gb of ram. I have read somewhere that people need to change something about vcache settings, but once when I got a computer that had already 1Gb of ram and I just installed a hard drive and installed win98se and everything just worked without changing anything and there were no memory related errors.

The three options for Win98 on systems with more than 512mb of RAM
1) Vcache manipulation (http://www.thpc.info/ram/vcache98.html)
2) RAM limiting consumption with HIMEMX, XMSDSK, etc.
3) The Rloew patch (http://rloew.x10host.com/Programs/Patchm.htm)