First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Thought it could be interesting to share tweaks and software that enhances Windows 98SE or is otherwise useful for retro gaming. DOS tweaks for retro gaming is a well documented topic, but I couldn't find anything similar for Win9x.
I'll start, though my list wouldn't be extensive for sure. Really hope others will share theirs!
I host a local FTP server at home that is accessible by all of my retro machines. It stores drivers, software, game disk images and so on. So a proper FTP client is really the first thing I install on every build I work on. Thankfully, TotalCommander supports Win9x to this day, and you can even download 16-bit version for Windows 3.11 from the official site.
Kind of useful for tweaking your Windows registry to get faster network transfers, though it's probably more relevant for systems newer than Socket 7.
This is the latest version of DT to support Win9x. It's a virtual CD drive that allows mounting almost all popular CD image formats without burning them.
Really popular tool for working with floppy images. You can read them (for example, when you want to copy your original drivers floppy and upload it to Vogonsdrivers.com), write them and even extract them.
I try to avoid very fast 52x CD drives because they are noisy and unreliable, but if that's all you got, you can get rid of the noise by simply making the drive slower.
When I started this hobby, none of my "modern" machines had a CD drive. So my only option was actually to write disks on my retro rigs. ImgBurn is the only freeware CD burning app that I know that supports Win9x and most CD image formats.
If you absolutely need to browse Web on your machine, this is probably the only actively developed web browser for Win9x.
Phil has a convenient selection of 3DMark and PCMark benchmarks over on his site.
Note that I'm not including Win98SE unofficial service packs because they always gave me issues (for some reason they mess up the Active Desktop, so My computer can't show anything 90% of the time). I would be happy to find a vanilla compilation of all official Microsoft updates for Win98SE though.