I've spent some time over the holidays tweaking and finishing off one of my retro machines.

The idea was "Fast Windows 98" for games like Half-Life and Quake2/3. I've targetted late 2000 for most of the hardware.

Its running an Athlon 1100, and a Quadro2 (Geforce 2 GTS) and currently dual boots both '98 and Windows 2000.

I'm having some weird issues with the Graphics drivers.

In Windows '98, I've installed Nvidia Driver 45.23. With this installed, trying to run Half-Life (installed from the original CD). Video is set to 1024x768, OpenGL. Any text that is supposed to appear on screen instead appears as a solid coloured box. If i try switching to Direct3D, the game crashes, or i get 1FPS, but the text on screen now functions despite the game being completely unplayable. Software rendering works, but looks like ass.

In Windows 2000, i'm running driver 61.77. However the same symptoms are present in OpenGL mode. Direct3D mode works but has glitches and oddness, for instance pressing escape to bring up the menu just shows a black screen.

Anyone got any ideas or pointers? Do i just need older drivers?