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

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?

You know you've got a fairly unorthodox Win98 build when you need to boot to WinXP for better Win98 compatibility 🤣

You are making things terribly difficult for yourself. You've already locked yourself out from DOS by not having an ISA slot and with too fast CPU. You've locked yourself out from later WinXP games by having an AGP slot. What you can do well is Win98-early WinXP games up to ~2002 DirectX 8 games depending what resolution you intend to use and how much AA/AF. Since Win98 is your primary target I think you should just find yourself a GeForce4 Ti 4200 or a FX 5600 or something like that and be done with it, you get plenty speed for that purpose and good compatibility.

I want a Frankenstein retro build 🤣

Joke aside you are right. Also because later I could make a XP build with that Z97, i7 4770k, GTX770.

Anyway I already bought a cheap FX5700 that will arrive next week but I made a mistake because of the “golden 45.23 drivers” that I’ll miss.
Edit: candle says that it’s possible to add the FX5700 to the inf.

The Ti 4200 is expensive, I found a FX5600 for 18€, is it “better” then the FX5700?

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-14, 09:46:

I want a Frankenstein retro build XD […]
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I want a Frankenstein retro build 🤣

Joke aside you are right. Also because later I could make a XP build with that Z97, i7 4770k, GTX770.

Anyway I already bought a cheap FX5700 that will arrive next week but I made a mistake because of the “golden 45.23 drivers” that I’ll miss.
Edit: candle says that it’s possible to add the FX5700 to the inf.

The Ti 4200 is expensive, I found a FX5600 for 18€, is it “better” then the FX5700?

Ti 4200 prices are all over the place, fleabay being fleabay, but there are some around 30€ there too. FX 5700 is faster than FX 5600, but you need to use 5x.xx drivers unless you can force those 45.23 work with them. But even if you need to use 5x.xx drivers I expect you'll be just fine. I doubt even the 45.23 drivers are perfect and flawless, there's always some game that wants to get difficult.

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-14, 10:15:

But even if you need to use 5x.xx drivers I expect you'll be just fine.

Ok, let’s wait for the FX5700 then, should arrive in the next few days. I will try the first drivers version that support the card after 45.23 hoping it’s a more stable choice then “forcing” the 45.23 ones.

I also learned how to backup the drive on Windows 10 via Macrium Reflect, so in case of fire 🤣 I will restore it.

Macrium is a good choice but if a restore optical disc is needed be sure to select the windows 32bit PE option 😀

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

You are right about that but while I was looking for a “ultimate Win98 build”, every choice here derives from the fact that I lo […]
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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?

Universal for xp, humm o&o defrag before version 19 contains a ssd trim option (from version 14 on). Adata toolbox 1.2 works on xp, any ssd, but on fat32 it seems that the process is too short to be true (on my 98 fat32 partition it lasted 1 second). I may suggest Boot it Bare Metal from Malawarebytes, in dos version. The demo version is sufficient. I boot in dos with it from an usb key, and with this software you can trim ntfs AND fat32 (I contacted them - and they confirmed it was not a "fake" process when the partition is fat32). ! I used this for years without problem.

sorry it's from "Terabyte unlimited", not from malawarebytes.
https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/

download page : https://www.terabyteunlimited.com/bootit-bare-metal/

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-10-26, 17:55:

Ok, I just ordered the motherboard. […]
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Ok, I just ordered the motherboard.

What do you guys think about these RAM sticks?

https://www.ebay.it/itm/124613596252

I would buy this 512 MB just for Windows 98 SE installation:

https://www.ebay.it/itm/224242203021?hash=ite … TwAAOSwYVRhBXFy

What do you think?

Value ram is ok I actually used it in Apple g4's dun overclock be sure your motherboards overclock is turned off or it will surely fry them.

vinxi2 wrote on 2021-11-14, 10:32:

Sombrero wrote on 2021-11-14, 10:15:

But even if you need to use 5x.xx drivers I expect you'll be just fine.

Ok, let’s wait for the FX5700 then, should arrive in the next few days. I will try the first drivers version that support the card after 45.23 hoping it’s a more stable choice then “forcing” the 45.23 ones.

I also learned how to backup the drive on Windows 10 via Macrium Reflect, so in case of fire 🤣 I will restore it.

You could grab a Voodoo 4 4500, I snagged one the other day off eBay for the price of a Voodoo 3 3000, sure its not the best and certainly no Voodoo 5 5500 but for Win98 it should be more than fine for many games. Only issue I can think of is some Direct X games might have issues with it if using the official drivers. Using 3rd party drivers should fix any DirectX issues. (Only reason to grab the Voodoo4 is if you can get it at Voodoo 3 prices otherwise the V3 3000 is just as good)

Personally I would avoid any of the FX 5xxx GPUs, they were notorious back in the day for being utter trash and picky GPUs. A cheap 6600gt would be a far better choice if you want to run nVidia and would be a good bridge GPU for both 98 and XP.

I've been looking for a voodoo4 thats not priced at triple digits for quite a while now, but alas nothing comes up. Same with voodoo5... 🙁 But voodoo3, I have multiple of, 2000, 3000, 3500, more than one of each, and were mostly dirt cheap. So from my experience its much easier to find a good deal on a voodoo3

What FX5000 were notorious for was weak dx9 performance, or to be exact shader performance. For dx3-8 games they were doing as good or better than the competition actually. Which is why they're not good winXP cards but they're pretty sweet win98 cards