kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 18:39:

Why would you *want* to trim fat32?

Why would you *not* want to trim it?

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:04:

kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 18:39:

Why would you *want* to trim fat32?

Why would you *not* want to trim it?

Because wear leveling SSDs under Win98 or DOS is not an issue.

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-12, 18:40:

If this partitions scheme works, I don't have to patch Win98 for larger HDDs.

as long as the drive is larger than 128gb, you WILL have to patch win98 for larger HDDs, partitions don't matter, if the drive itself is larger and win98 is not patched, data corruption will occur

kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:27:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:04:

kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 18:39:

Why would you *want* to trim fat32?

Why would you *not* want to trim it?

Because wear leveling SSDs under Win98 or DOS is not an issue.

Yeah I figured it's not a big deal, never heard of anyone having issues because of it. Still, if one can trim it, then why not? Even once a year would be better than never, I'd rather do that than leave the PC idle for hours so garbage collection can do its thing.

God Of Gaming wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:43:

as long as the drive is larger than 128gb, you WILL have to patch win98 for larger HDDs, partitions don't matter, if the drive itself is larger and win98 is not patched, data corruption will occur

AH!

So it was completely useless to divide the rest of the space into two <137GB partitions.
I hope I can merge them by expanding the first one with some partition manager on XP in non-destructive mode.

Another question: XP 32bit or 64bit? I totally forgot of this difference and I installed the 32bit one.

But is it a good idea not to install GPU drivers in both OSes to "keep them clean meanwhile"?

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:43:

kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:27:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:04:

Why would you *not* want to trim it?

Because wear leveling SSDs under Win98 or DOS is not an issue.

Yeah I figured it's not a big deal, never heard of anyone having issues because of it. Still, if one can trim it, then why not? Even once a year would be better than never, I'd rather do that than leave the PC idle for hours so garbage collection can do its thing.

Garbage collection is not an alternative to TRIM. TRIM makes garbage collection more effective by giving the SSD more empty blocks to work with. But seriously....are you getting close to filling up a 120GB SSD on Win98 or DOS7? You have better things to worry about than this.

vinxi2, here's a possible build that covers DOS/98/XP (with some compatibility caveats): MSI MS-7253 / K9VGM-V (KM890, VIA8237A) , Athlon 64 X2 5050e, Radeon X800 XL

People always seem to want to aim high end when it comes dual booting between win98 and winXP. I think that is the problem. winxp system requirements are really not that high that you cant have win98 and winxp in same system and have good compatibility. Even I fell into that trap when I built my Athlon64 FX-60 and GeForce FX 5950 ultra system. I was just looking for the most high end motherboards that still has win98 drivers everything on the motherboard. If I remember correctly that minimum system requirements for win XP were only like 64MB of ram.

Of course someone who would want to run crysis and win98 era games on same system would run into problems, but if you keep your expectations reasonable you can probably run most early winXP games on a system that can still run win98 fine.

kolderman wrote on 2021-11-12, 21:03:

Garbage collection is not an alternative to TRIM. TRIM makes garbage collection more effective by giving the SSD more empty blocks to work with. But seriously....are you getting close to filling up a 120GB SSD on Win98 or DOS7? You have better things to worry about than this.

I am aware of garbage collection not being an alternative to trim, they work together.

Crucial wrote:

For Active Garbage Collection to have an effect, the SSD needs to have periods of idle time. If the SSD is not given any idle time (ie., constant data transfers), then Active Garbage Collection will never be triggered. The drive must also have empty space available, because Trim and Active Garbage Collection both rely on the ability to move data between sectors as a part of the clean-up. For best results, keeping at least 10% of your SSD clear ensures this process runs optimally.

An SSD that is not receiving Trim commands, and where Active Garbage Collection never runs properly, will never have the cells on the drive cleaned out after data is deleted. Over time, this will lead to an accumulation of 'junk' data, which will reduce performance and can cause system freezing.

If you notice performance decreasing on the SSD, you might need to force Active Garbage Collection to run by powering the SSD on and leaving it idle for 6 to 8 hours. After that, your drive’s functionality and performance should be restored.

https://www.crucial.com/support/articles-faq- … has-slowed-down

Therefore, at least the way I understand it, to keep SSD topped up one either needs to trim it or let the PC idle for 6 to 8 hours. I'd rather use trim if there is a quick and easy way to do so. But again, never seen anyone having issues with this, so even though I'm advocating for TRIM here I wonder just how long and how much one would have to use DOS/Win98 to actually notice any performance loss, or would the drive just die before that even happens.

Oh and @vinxi2, if you used that FreeDOS patched FDISK, you might want to stay away from that R. Loews DOS Trim program I linked, apparently they don't like each other:
Corruption issue when using rloew's TRIM.EXE (TRIM utility for DOS) with FreeDOS FDISK 1.2.1/1.3.1 partitioned DISK

Baoran wrote on 2021-11-13, 03:17:

People always seem to want to aim high end when it comes dual booting between win98 and winXP

You are right about that but while I was looking for a “ultimate Win98 build”, every choice here derives from the fact that I looked for a “modern motherboard” hoping that it would be a more “safer” and “longtime” choice.
I then found this new old stock motherboard and since CPUs and RAM are cheap I basically “maxed out” it and aim for high end CPU for Win98 and good for XP.

But right now I somehow had to press the brake because of the GPUs prices and 8bit paletted texture and table fog compatibility that affect an unknown number of titles in a way that I don’t fully understand. Your GPU would be ideal but is sold at high prices here.

For what I understood if you go on XP territory and ditch Win98 you have a huge selection of hardware, you can go up to GTX 7xx. Yesterday just for curiosity I put the (magic) Easy2Boot USB key into a Z97 motherboard with i7 4770k and GTX770. I didn’t even turn off AHCI in the BIOS since I could run SATA drivers before XP setup, but I couldn’t go on because it didn’t recognize Win10 installation and couldn’t write “boot files”.

Oh and @vinxi2, if you used that FreeDOS patched FDISK, you might want to stay away from that R. Loews DOS Trim program I linked, apparently they don't like each other:
Corruption issue when using rloew's TRIM.EXE (TRIM utility for DOS) with FreeDOS FDISK 1.2.1/1.3.1 partitioned DISK

Thank you. But is there an “universal” TRIM utility for XP?

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-13, 09:34:

For what I understood if you go on XP territory and ditch Win98 you have a huge selection of hardware, you can go up to GTX 7xx.

GTX 9xx actually, currently my most op winXP PC has an overclocked 8-core xeon e5-1680v2 and a gtx 980. Though people say gtx 7xx actually performs faster than gtx 9xx under XP, which I haven't tested, but if you then dualboot with win7, which I have, the 980 makes sense

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-13, 09:34:

But right now I somehow had to press the brake because of the GPUs prices and 8bit paletted texture and table fog compatibility that affect an unknown number of titles in a way that I don’t fully understand.

Of the two, table fog is generally easier to notice. You either have fog, or not.

With paletted textures, the visual impact is less clear, unless a game specifically requires them to work, like the retail version of FF7. In a few weeks, when I have more time, I intend to do some additional testing with paletted textures in games where people say they make a visible difference. One such example would be Dino Crisis.

About ati table fog on win98, you can regedit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ATI Technologies\Driver\000x\atidxhal, and set WFogEnable to 0, and set both ZFogEnable and TableFogEnable to 1. Then Thief 2 should look like nvidia/3dfx on ati

God Of Gaming wrote on 2021-11-13, 11:13:

About ati table fog on win98, you can regedit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ATI Technologies\Driver\000x\atidxhal, and set WFogEnable to 0, and set both ZFogEnable and TableFogEnable to 1. Then Thief 2 should look like nvidia/3dfx on ati

Not from my experience.

First, that tweak only seems to work on certain ATi cards using a specific driver version. For example, I was unable to make it work with my 9000 Pro using either 4.3 or 6.2 drivers. Furthermore, old TTLG posts indicate that even when that works, the effect looks different (worse) than on Nvidia and 3DFX cards.

The only known way to get correct table fog emulation on ATi cards is to use drivers 7.11 or higher, but those only work on WinXP and up.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-11-13, 11:33:

The only known way to get correct table fog emulation on ATi cards is to use drivers 7.11 or higher, but those only work on WinXP and up.

This is really interesting.

https://drivers.amd.com/relnotes/catalyst_711 … ease_notes.html

Does this driver enable 8 bit paletted textures as well? Or only table fog?

Here KT7AGuy mentions also the paletted textures for 9600/9800 in XP as well:
Re: I don't understand all the hate for the Nvidia FX series

Could it mean that WinXP with a 9600/9800 with 7.11+ drivers can actually give those features with Win9X games on XP, without having to search for a 45.23 GPU that would be great only for Win98?

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-13, 13:12:

https://drivers.amd.com/relnotes/catalyst_711 … ease_notes.html

But we're talking about GPUs that won't work at all on Win98, right?

The last version of ATi drivers that can be installed on Win98 is 6.2. Anything higher than that won't work.

Does this driver enable 8 bit paletted textures as well? Or only table fog?

Here KT7AGuy mentions also the paletted textures for 9800 in XP as well:
Re: I don't understand all the hate for the Nvidia FX series

Table fog emulation works on 7.11 drivers, according to TTLG forums. Not sure about paletted textures. I will test both when I am able to.

This could make the ATI 9800 another sweet spot for a dual boot, a fast card for Win9X that can also compensate those features on XP with those drivers, and a good XP card too. Right?

God Of Gaming wrote on 2021-11-13, 11:13:

About ati table fog on win98, you can regedit HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\ATI Technologies\Driver\000x\atidxhal, and set WFogEnable to 0, and set both ZFogEnable and TableFogEnable to 1. Then Thief 2 should look like nvidia/3dfx on ati

Just a quick update, I was finally able to make the fog work on Win98SE using 4.3 drivers and the Rage3D tweak utility. For some reason, I needed the multimedia (WDM) version of the ATi driver for this to work on my Radeon 9000 Pro. Maybe because it's one of those All-In-Wonder cards.

Anyway, the fog works now but, as stated by the people on the TTLG forums, it looks different than it does on Nvidia and 3DFX cards. I'll post some pictures tomorrow in the table fog thread.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-11-13, 17:15:

Just a quick update, I was finally able to make the fog work on Win98SE using 4.3 drivers and the Rage3D tweak utility.

Joseph do you think that it will be possible with a 9800 as well?

Can you post there "the instructions"?

Did you also get 8 bit paletted texture support?

God Of Gaming wrote on 2021-11-12, 19:43:

as long as the drive is larger than 128gb, you WILL have to patch win98 for larger HDDs

God I installed the Ralph HCDP - High Capacity Disk Patch for Win9x and now Win98 is way more stable. Thank you (again and again).

I think that both OSes are stable and "empty" enough that I would like to backup the entire disk before trying everything else.
I'm in love with Macrium Reflect Free right now.

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-13, 17:24:

Joseph do you think that it will be possible with a 9800 as well?

Probably, but it may depend on the driver version.

Can you post there "the instructions"?

Same as God Of Gaming suggested: disable WFog and enable both ZFog and TableFog. I used the Rage 3D Tweak utility for that because it's more convenient than manually creating registry entries, but I'm sure that would have worked too. The main problem with my card was that it needed those special multimedia drivers to get this working. It still doesn't function with stock 4.3 or 6.2 drivers for me.

Did you also get 8 bit paletted texture support?

No.