Well, as youtube is having stuff like "can windows 98 run on your modern pc?" without end, the question that arose within me is, would it work on my pc? so i tried.
i have an "slightly" older notebook, ideapad z570, intel core i7-2600, 8GB RAM. Since its an older model, it should be more compatible to windows 98.
even the touchpad works, the vbem driver for video works just fine as well. HD Realtek codec is unthinkable thou.
But there is one thing that bothered me and it was so tempting to achieve it - get windows 98se natively connected to the internet. so i started my search and i found something. the network card of ideapad z570 is called "realtek rtl8136".
so much so good, this kind of nic already existed back in the days of windows 98. so i downloaded the driver, install - reboot - yellow mark in device manager - incompatible.
so i was just curious, why it is incompatible ? well, turns out, the rtl8136 is having rev05, but the driver is til rev03.
but that is not the end. i compared other versions of the same driver family, since realtek seems to release this driver family from year to year. i found out, that this driver got its support for windows 9x cancelled around 2010.
however, this is where the real strange story start to begin. I downloaded different drivers. first i found one of the year 2014. that i really wouldnt expect to work ,it is written for 2k or xp. so no it couldnt work. but there is some detail that caught my attention..
in the inf file there is a weird section, even in the 2014 inf file that is called "Windows 98/ME". and its not like the section for it would be empty. in fact, there *are* still Commands like AddReg, CopyFiles and such. The whole inf file is containing almost all necessary information in oder to install in windows 98, the sections at least seem complete in comparison to the file i downloaded from 2006.
however, when i try to choose the file, i simply get the usual error message that it is not a valid inf file. i dont even understand why, the data w98 needs are all in there. what is keeping the os from taking it?
anyways, i dont necessarily need the inf file to use the sys file for the OS. so basically what i did is, i installed the old driver the regular way. after that, i simply took the file i downloaded on my regular pc with the "new" rtenic.sys and simply replaced the one in %windir%\system. after a reboot i expected.. well a protection error or an bluescreen. neither happened.
instead, the yellow mark has disappeared. at first i couldnt believe it. even the data was clearly shown in the driver info like "this file from 2014, this 386 files are loaded by it". a short look to the bootlog.txt (of course restart and F8 - Bootlog option, change date of the bootlog leaves no doubt that is was the actual one) - revealed that the driver even got successfully loaded. a driver from 2014, loaded into an OS of 1998. never thought even that would be possible, especially not between generations of NT and 9X Kernel.
but sadly, this is not the end of the story. there *is* indeed a problem. i played around with the network adapter, different inf files and such and i managed to "asd'd" my TCP/IP Adapter, which was the reason why it worked.
well, after i figured out why the stack is not loaded, i re-activated with asd.exe the tcp/ip adapter. after rebooting, the thing i expected before happened- protection error.
after that i almost got desperate, tried all rtenic.sys i could find but there were only 2 possibilities: with tcp/ip loaded protection error or yellow mark.

this is more like a report, than an inquiry. someday probably someone might want to try what i tried. and so i gathered everything i learned from that and posted it here.
but indeed, if someone have a good idea how i can solve the protection error *with* newer driver, im all open for it.

@additional information: i learned that maybe ndis2 dos-driver might be a suitable solution. i loaded the rtlend.dos file from realtek.com.tw and added entry to config.sys with device=c:\windows\rtlend.dos . however the driver says "internal error" and doesn't load. wonder why though, it seems to be the right one. not sure what i'm have potentially missed.