Somebody had this problem in the past. Unfortunately solution is not known 🙁

Yeah, saw that thread too, wonder if he finally managed to get it working. 😒

However I did a little progress - upon one logged boot up, Windows managed to start, although in 16 colours. The device manager showed that the device is working and the drivers are okay, but there's a memory range conflict with the PCI-to-PCI bridge.

Unfortunately manually changing the values to another region (that clearly shows 'no conflicts') did nothing, as the PC still boots into a black screen while I try to set the colour depth and resolution to something else than 16 colours and 640x480. Is there a way to properly set these values, either from Windows or BIOS?

What's via 4in1 drivers did you used?

I've tried three different VIA 4 in 1/Hyperion chipset drivers - 4.35, 4.56 and 5.14 - however they all produced the same result...

I would try another Windows 98. I mean there are OEM and Retail versions of Windows 98 se. Sometimes they give the same PnP device different range of i/o , addresses .

Okay, I actually managed to find a dirt cheap VIA Epia board (the EN10000G one), as suggested in the previous thread. Even more amusingly, it looked like both boards had pretty much the same BIOS settings. Used the same Win98 disk, Hyperion 4 in 1 and CN700/S3 display drivers.

And guess what? Works like a charm - display, Direct3D, accelerated games and all that fluff...

So yeah, case solved - Jetway graphic chip (and most likely the CN700 in the rest of the bunch that used VIA chipsets, like ECS or MSI) is incompatible with Windows 9X, unless you somehow get the original (and most likely modified) drivers first. To save any future headaches (especially if you wish to build a mini ITX retro gaming PC like me), just go with the VIA Epia board instead of the alternatives.

Hope sometime we can have a solution. I have a thinclient with the same problem, same black screen in win98.. Thinkin about WinME but Dos games ddn like too much 😒

Not sure if this will help but I have a different VIA board EPIA-SP (800MHz) and I was having lots of problems until I disabled the USB ports and removed the USB folder from the chipset driver, and used a specific chipset driver and video driver. (I can then later reactive the USB and install those usb-stick drivers NUSB? and use the USB ports that way).

I use these drivers (chipset and VGA): https://www.viatech.com/en/support/eol/epia-sp-series-eol/ (they say XP but include W98 too).

I'm trying to get this working with Windows 98SE: https://www.jetwaycomputer.com/J7F5M.html

Seems dead end. It has VIA Unichrome Pro 2 and Unichrome Pro Win98SE -drivers won't work. Installer says I don't have the right display adapter and when I force install it gives me text mode with vertical bars and crashes there.

Hi,

sorry for necro-bumping this thread but I found a "workable solution" for my particular CN700 board and Win98SE. Instead of installing the proper S3 VGA drivers, I came upon these universal Win9x VESA drivers: https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm (also archived by someone else at https://archive.org/details/vesa_graphics_drivers_iso). If I understand correctly, it's the same idea behind Windows XP's universal VGA driver and based on its code.

The board I have is a 3V700D from a Linux-based "Terra Black Dwarf" hardware firewall with a Via Eden 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. I got a black screen the first time I installed the driver, but after trying one of the "VGA compatible (no resources)" variants it's been working fine, even after reverting back to the default "Standard Video Adapter" one.

The performance in Windows is surprisingly OK. Dragging windows shows a lot of lag, but everything else is really snappy. Of course there's no 3D acceleration of any sort and you can forget about Direct3D/OpenGL games. Still, I get between 10-20 FPS in Unreal Gold on software rendering at 640x480 16bit if running windowed. For some reason going full screen shaves off 3-5fps, even though it's the same resolution and bit depth. I need to test some more intense 2D games like Age Of Empires. My impression is that drawing pixels to the screen has a maximal (low) upper limit, so full screen redraws at 640x480 16bit cap out at ~20fps. Some very visible tearing in Unreal and when dragging windows goes in line with that theory.

Still, now the system is actually usable in Win98, which it wasn't really before in 16 colors mode. 😀 Maybe this helps someone else with one of these boards in the future!

Observations specific to my board - feel free to skip if only interested in VGA stuff. 😉

For reference, find a picture of the BIOS POST screen attached.

The board doesn't have audio. AC97 apparently was an option, but it's not populated, which makes sense for a firewall device. But a noname cheap USB sound card was instantly recognized by Win98SE with USB patch and, to my great surprise, even provides Soundblaster emulation at A220 I5 D1 and General MIDI at 330h for DOS applications running in windows! Duke3D, DOOM and Monkey Island run flawlessly with these settings, though Monkey Island expects Roland MT32 instruments, not General Midi, and thus sounds bad. Still, sound! If now there was an Adlib-emulating sound driver / TRS that would run in Win9x, then this machine would be actually quite decent for DOS gaming - for anything that runs well within Windows. Sadly, The Lost Vikings is not one of those games, it runs slowly and the music lags.

To anyone else coming here by googling, here's a few references I found for my 3V700D device:

• https://www.omtec.de/bilder/datenblaetter/lex … ards/3V700D.pdf - A German manufacturer that used to distribute this board in the past. No drivers etc available, and they instantly replied to an email that this is so old that they don't have any information on that board anymore. It's awesome that they took the time to reply though, thanks folks at Omtec!
• http://tprd.info/lexwiki/index.php/MB:3V700D - The wiki of what seems to be the board's manufacturer. It talks about Linux and Windows CE 5.0 based use cases. I don't think I'd be able to do anything with the WinCE stuff. Maybe someone more skilled than me could figure out what's different between how VIA's CN700 driver talks to the IGP and how the WinCE driver does it, but certainly I cannot. 😉

Hope this wall of text might be useful to anyone in the future. For me it was a reason to finally advance from lurker to poster, so hi everyone! 😀

Cheers
mikerofone

Well, might as well mention that the driver download page for the MSI K8MM-V motherboard has a graphics driver package that contains drivers for both XP/2K and for Win 98/ME. That motherboard has the Via/S3 UniChrome Pro IGP. I haven't tried mine in Win98 yet, but anyone looking for Win98 drivers for that IGP, might wanna try those.