• Aliens vs Predator FAILURE
• Arcanum FAILURE
• Baldur's Gate 2 SUCCESS
• Blood Omen 2 SUCCESS
• Deus Ex SUCCESS
• Divine Divinity FAILURE
• Icewind Dale SUCCESS
• Icewind Dale 2 SUCCESS
• Legacy of Kain Defiance SUCCESS
• Legacy of Kain Soul Reaver 2 SUCCESS
• Neverwinter Nights Diamond FAILURE SUCCESS
  Making NWN Diamond work on 98SE is a bit involved. The .bin file is larger than 2Gb, and while FAT32 supports files up to 4Gb, Windows 98SE doesn't, even with the unofficial fix. The size of the file shows as negative in Explorer, and the installer freezes the whole system.
  You can either install it on a Windows XP PC and copy the files (the easy way), and it should work.
  The way I did it, I installed innoextract via homebrew on MacOS and typed in innoextract setup_nwn_diamond_2.1.0.21.exe --gog. It extracted the EXE file but demanded unar to be installed to be able to extract the .bin file. So I installed unar, again through homebrew, and ran the command once again.
  The process will create a few folders, what you want to do is to copy the contents of \Support\Game\ folder into the \Game\ folder, where the main game files are. After that, just copy the contents of the \Game\ folder to your Windows 98 PC and it will just work.
• Rune Classic FAILURE
• Sacrifice SUCCESS
  Will ask for a CD Key.
• Stronghold HD SUCCESS
• Temple of Elemental Evil SUCCESS
• Thief 2 FAILURE
• Unreal Tournament Gold SUCCESS
• Unreal Gold SUCCESS
• Vampire the Masquerade Redemption SUCCESS

Just a side note, that so called "unofficial service pack" is known to break things in various ways.

You're better off dual-booting Win98 and WinXP. Most GOG games will install fine under WinXP and can be copied over to Win98 as needed.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-17, 08:05:

Just a side note, that so called "unofficial service pack" is known to break things in various ways.

You're better off dual-booting Win98 and WinXP. Most GOG games will install fine under WinXP and can be copied over to Win98 as needed.

The "unofficial service pack" is its own can of worms, it took me two days to figure it out. For example, both me and Michael MJD on YouTube were unable to install it the normal way, especially the core components, but I was eventually able to find a workaround - Michael was killing INFEX, which was not responding, but that would end the installation prematurely and leave a broken installation. WINOLDAP is what needs to be killed, which allows the installation to go forward and finish. I needed the SP to fix the memory caching issues with Win98SE, which has better ways of doing, like modern XMS managers, but at the time I thought this would be faster. Oh how wrong I was.

One thing the "unofficial service pack" fixed was the performance issues I was having after a clean install even with all drivers - a weird thing that kept happening and I don't know the reason, installing anything would make the mouse lag and stutter and the whole system would almost lock up until the install was done. Overall, there was one UPNP DLL broken on startup, which I just removed from startup and so far the system is remarkably stable and the results I'm getting now are consistent with pre-SP Win98 installations.

songoffall wrote on 2024-01-17, 08:29:

One thing the "unofficial service pack" fixed was the performance issues I was having after a clean install even with all drivers - a weird thing that kept happening and I don't know the reason, installing anything would make the mouse lag and stutter and the whole system would almost lock up until the install was done.

Sounds like DMA wasn't enabled for the hard drive and/or CD-ROM in Device Manager. Either that, or some driver mismatch.

Overall, there was one UPNP DLL broken on startup, which I just removed from startup and so far the system is remarkably stable and the results I'm getting now are consistent with pre-SP Win98 installations.

I suggest searching the Vogons forum for "unofficial service pack". You'll find a bunch of posts where people had inexplicable issues on their Win98 system with that installed, which immediately went away after they stopped using it.

But if your system is stable, then more power to you. I'm just advising to be cautious when installing that stuff on a retro rig which is primarily aimed at gaming.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-17, 08:50:

Sounds like DMA wasn't enabled for the hard drive and/or CD-ROM in Device Manager. Either that, or some driver mismatch. […]
Show full quote

songoffall wrote on 2024-01-17, 08:29:

One thing the "unofficial service pack" fixed was the performance issues I was having after a clean install even with all drivers - a weird thing that kept happening and I don't know the reason, installing anything would make the mouse lag and stutter and the whole system would almost lock up until the install was done.

Sounds like DMA wasn't enabled for the hard drive and/or CD-ROM in Device Manager. Either that, or some driver mismatch.

Overall, there was one UPNP DLL broken on startup, which I just removed from startup and so far the system is remarkably stable and the results I'm getting now are consistent with pre-SP Win98 installations.

I suggest searching the Vogons forum for "unofficial service pack". You'll find a bunch of posts where people had inexplicable issues on their Win98 system with that installed, which immediately went away after they stopped using it.

But if your system is stable, then more power to you. I'm just advising to be cautious when installing that stuff on a retro rig which is primarily aimed at gaming.

And your advise is more than welcome. As I already said, the whole service pack is shaky and mostly unusable unless you do certain things at certain points.

Btw, the service pack does enable DMA for all devices, it's a separate option. I can only assume that the VIA drivers did this when installing them, and the nForce drivers did not.

There was something else that bothered me. One of my drives reported a bunch of bad clusters before the update, absent on a previous Windows install (VIA chipset) and after the update they miraculously disappeared. Scanning with Seatools showed me a single bad cluster, but I already knew about that one.

• Mortal Kombat 4 - FAILURE
  Might be fixable. The problem is with libvorbis.dll, maybe it will launch with a replacement. The game also contains nglide wrapper, which too might need to be removed.
• Ultima IX Ascension - FAILURE
  nglide causes gray screen after the intro cinematic. Might work after removing nglide properly.
• Gothic - SUCCESS

  Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-22, 11:11:

  The GOG release of Gothic ships with a version of ddraw.dll which may be too new for some retro systems. It makes the game very sluggish.

  Deleting that file from the Gothic\system folder should resolve the issue.

• Dungeon Keeper Gold - SUCCESS-ish
  It installs with DOSBOX, extracting and running the game image is easy enough. Running through DOSBOX is a torture on older PCs.

songoffall wrote on 2024-01-22, 10:43:

Gothic - SUCCESS

The GOG release of Gothic ships with a version of ddraw.dll which may be too new for some retro systems. It makes the game very sluggish.

Deleting that file from the Gothic\system folder should resolve the issue.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2024-01-22, 11:11:

songoffall wrote on 2024-01-22, 10:43:

Gothic - SUCCESS

The GOG release of Gothic ships with a version of ddraw.dll which may be too new for some retro systems. It makes the game very sluggish.

Deleting that file from the Gothic\system folder should resolve the issue.

It was fine on my system, but then, my system is overkill for Gothic. Thanks for your input, mate!

• Hitman: Agent 47 SUCCESS
• Hitman 2: Silent Assassin SUCCESS
• Warlords Battlecry 3 SUCCESS
• SiN Gold FAILURE

• Medal of Honor Allied Assault Battlechest SUCCESS
• Anachronox SUCCESS
• Serious Sam The First Encounter SUCCESS
• Serious Sam The Second Encounter SUCCESS
• Giants Citizen Kabuto FAILURE SUCCESS
  Might be fixable. The included gg_dx7r.dll might be the likely culprit, looking into the file it definitely is not the original. Will try to get the original from Archive.org and see if it fixes the problem.
  Doesn't work out of the box, but is fixable. GOG.com support provides with two alternate versions of gg_dx7r.dll, the one in the DX7 folder worked like a charm. Here's the link:
  https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/213 … etc?product=gog

Another update: the "Unofficial SP" does introduce a lot of weird stuff, so I eventually ended up ditching it. I actually ditched the Windows 98SE CD I was using too, it seems to have degraded over the years and the installation program failed to notice file corruption. Fresh Windows 98 SE, with the usual updates and a few options from 98SE auto patcher - there's a lot in the auto patcher that makes the system unstable as hell, third party and unofficial modules are to be avoided. But two fixes in particular seem to be good - one of them deals with large HDDs, and the other - with files larger than 2Gb, which makes me think NVN Diamond could be installed.

• Gothic 2 SUCCESS
  You need to remove all the wrappers like draw.dll in the game folder, or else the game won't work on Windows 98SE
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein SUCCESS
• Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines SUCCESS
  Both Commandos and its expansion freeze your system on hardware level if you have K-Lite Codec Pack installed. Black screen, audio plays, nothing else works.
• Commandos: Beyond the Call of Duty SUCCESS
• Commandos 2: Men of Courage SUCCESS
• Worms Armageddon SUCCESS