I had good luck with Win98 talking to both XP and Win7 in the far distant past. Have not done it in a long time and do not recall if I mapped a drive to an IP addy or just used simple file sharing...

It's not a Windows version, but my experience may interest you :
I've solved this issue by using a small raspberry pi connected to a HDD which acts kinda like a "retro NAS" and can be checked from DOS/Windows 3.x/9x/NT4 and Windows 7/10 with no issues. The pi's network speed may not be great (I'm using a pi 2 so it's 100mbps over USB 2.0 internally) but for that usage it's definitely fast enough (a retro PC will never max out the pi I think).
It works like any linux computer on which you'd have Samba installed.

Maybe time to consider a Linux based NAS . If you have a spare machine, installing something like OpenMediaVault requires practically no Linux skills and works great with clients from Win9x up to and including Windows 10 .

Spare computer is easy, ive got a phenom II X4 945 with 4gb of ram and a GT240 doing nothing useful

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:03:

So instead of equipping my retro rigs each with a 120gb (win98) and 500gb Windows XP just for storing iso images of my games (not risking original CDs anymore), which windows version will support seamless file transfer or network drive mapping (network location) so I just keep all isos in one central location for mounting.

In theory you can use the DOS networking client with some versions of Windows.

A second copy would stay on my WIN10 ftp box but I have absolute hell making 9x talk to 10

Have you already read about enabling SMB1 in Windows 10?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-serv … ble-smbv1-v2-v3
http://kishy.ca/?p=1511

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:38:

Spare computer is easy, ive got a phenom II X4 945 with 4gb of ram and a GT240 doing nothing useful

That would work fine . Just need storage disks .

I ran it on an Acer H340 until 4 months ago .
Atom CPU with 2GB RAM

Jorpho wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:38:

In theory you can use the DOS networking client with some versions of Windows. […]
Show full quote

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:03:

So instead of equipping my retro rigs each with a 120gb (win98) and 500gb Windows XP just for storing iso images of my games (not risking original CDs anymore), which windows version will support seamless file transfer or network drive mapping (network location) so I just keep all isos in one central location for mounting.

In theory you can use the DOS networking client with some versions of Windows.

A second copy would stay on my WIN10 ftp box but I have absolute hell making 9x talk to 10

Have you already read about enabling SMB1 in Windows 10?
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-serv … ble-smbv1-v2-v3
http://kishy.ca/?p=1511

An option, until Microsoft completely pull the plug on SMB1 .

darry wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:55:

That would work fine . Just need storage disks . […]
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candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-03, 21:38:

Spare computer is easy, ive got a phenom II X4 945 with 4gb of ram and a GT240 doing nothing useful

That would work fine . Just need storage disks .

I ran it on an Acer H340 until 4 months ago .
Atom CPU with 2GB RAM

well i have an older sas controller and SAS drives are dirt cheap these days used i could go that way 🤣

as a temporary solution what about virtualbox running with shared folders hosting windows 2000 to then share that shared folder, would that work 🤣

candle_86 wrote on 2020-05-03, 22:14:

as a temporary solution what about virtualbox running with shared folders hosting windows 2000 to then share that shared folder, would that work 🤣

Probably, as long as you're not expecting good performance .

I used to use VirtualPC 2007 running a Win98 guest to get around modern Windows' connectivity issues with my old PCs since while SMB's enabled on both, they absolutely couldn't ever cooperate with each other.

My NAS is a super simple setup: I have OpenWRT running on my router and a USB drive connected to it.
All I need to do to have this drive accessible on Windows 98SE/ME/XP/7 and 10 was to mount the harddrives filesystem by following this tutorial here:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/storage/u … ives-quickstart

After that I installed the luci-app-samba application which lets me create a network share from the webinterface just by checking some buttons and giving it a name - under the hood this is based on Samba 3.6.

This makes sure SMB1 is available on Windows 98, but it can also use the more secure SMB2 protocol on Windows 10 for the same share. It's all done over the webinterface of the router.

Samba3 can be installed on any computer that runs Linux, so it doesn't neccessarily have to be a router (although it's very convenient, because I need one anyway).
I was not able to get this working with Samba4, though - although that is indeed supposed to work with Windows 98, just not out of the box...

I have a little netbook running windows XP that i use for my windows 98 boxes. If you enable SMB 1.0 in windows features, it works with windows 10

oohms wrote on 2020-05-04, 03:12:

If you enable SMB 1.0 in windows features, it works with windows 10

True, but that's really not a good idea if your machine is also connected to the internet.
SMBv1 has already been used to spread WannaCry, Petya and other ransomware and should stay disabled on Windows 10.

If Windows 10 should talk to Win98 (and vice versa) via SMB1, you will also need to Install the "DSclient" on the Windows 98 machine as this client enables the required "NTLM Version 2 Authentification".

If your setting up a "middle man" such as a server, nas or whatever.
For Pre Win7 you want SMB1 protocol
But Windows 10 you can you can map over ftp rather then lowering your security by enabling SMB1
https://www.thewindowsclub.com/map-an-ftp-drive-windows