rasteri wrote on 2022-02-18, 23:12:

Hmm that does sound pretty broken

Yeah, unfortunately. That’s okay, I was able to buy the same LDOs as was in your BOM now that they’re back in stock on Mouser. I am betting that fixes it, but I’m also going to pay a little bit more attention to that circuit and making sure I see 3.3v running out through those lines in future builds. This is just a good example as how subbing for other hardware that “looks right” may not always work the way you intend.

In other news, I also got the pin header extension to put an X2GS on one of these for kicks. Won’t fit in the enclosure anymore, ofc, 🤣, but I just wanted to hear that synthesizer going. :3

Thanks a bunch for replies and such. I really do appreciate it rasteri. I’m super excited to get some of these units finished and in the hands of some enthusiasts. 😀

I got Dune 2 working just the way I wanted.

So the weecee has 256 MB RAM, and only 64 MB is detected in DOS. That's overkill anyway. But it's seldom a bad kind of overkill.

In Dune 2's setup, if you have it patched to a later revision, you can select Sound Canvas for "sound" (that's what's written in the program but they mean "music") and SB Pro for sound effects and SB Pro again for digitized speech. But they tell you you need 1 Mb or above of "expanded" (again a mistake, you have to read extended here) for it to work. Then they ask you if you want to use this memory to enable speech and having so much of it messes with their detection and it thinks you don't have enough.

So, sound canvas works fine, sound effects work fine but no cheesy speech in the narration of the intro.

The only way I got it to work was to go through the setup process in a controlled dosbox environment that had just a modest amount of Ram. It created the dune2.cfg file I needed, which I transfered over to the weecee. Everything works as it should. The cfg file is binary so you can't just edit it yourself.

I could probably not even have done it on my physical IBM 486 DX2/66 as it has 32 Mb ram in 2 16 MB sticks, perhaps dune 2 would have tripped on it as well.

Update: Got the new/correct LDOs today, installed them, 3.3v comes through like a charm. Noticed the lights on the LAN port lit up as well, since it's also on the 3.3v. Now it's onwards to getting this external USB CD-ROM to be recognized correctly for Win98 setup to boot. May have to fiddle around with some things to get a clean Win98 image on this SD card. I'ma coming Muon, I'ma coming.

Further update: Got Win98 installed but it's hanging on first time booting screen. *sigh* Dunno what is causing it, might try reflowing some solder connections, like on the audio chip, just to be certain.

More update: Reflowed all my solder joints and all I managed to do was make the keyboard/mouse stop working, so reflowed again and got it unstuck. Still same issue with SDCard and Win98 hanging on first boot. I notice that if I try to install Win98 directly from SDCard (as opposed to Easy2Boot on the USB stick) then Win98 setup fails out, saying a CAB is broken. I am thinking maybe either the SD card itself is bad, or something in the SD circuit is messed up. Checked that entire circuit out, looks good. Cannot begin to understand what it might be. Going to try a different SD card, but I am running out of options here. 😖

I had a lot of problems installing win98. It kept hanging. I found a better image elsewhere. I can look hard to refind it for you, but it's definitely not the first result you get from google! Stop reflowing things, your machine is probably fine! Also use DOS for a bit and enjoy your machine!

Yeah, I’ve been trying various Win98 images, and while the OEMs are bootable, they hang after install on first startup, both First Edition and Second Edition. The Retail versions aren’t bootable, but copying the Win98 folder over to the MicroSD and running setup after booting (same way Rasteri does it in his videos) results in CAB errors, and “serious disk error” messages that I can’t get around (as pictured).

*sigh* been beating my head against this all day, no progress. Any ideas what it could be?

My next attempt I think I’m going to try to copy a successfully installed virtual box image over to the SD card. Outside of that, no idea what’s wrong.

Update: Tried installing Win98 OEM to VirtualBox, converted vdi over to raw, direct copied that over SD card. Same issue - hangs on startup. Tried different SD card, same issue. I am thinking this may be a BIOS issue? Some sort of issue with talking to the SD card through the IDE emulation. Maybe there is a new BIOS revision out there? Will continue trying various esoteric bios settings. I also pulled off some caps on my board just to test, and they are completely within spec (although I do have some X7R stuff in place of X5R, such as on C15/16/38/39, which doesn't seem to affect anything (quite the opposite, supposed to have greater heat tolerance)). Same with resistors, within spec. Going to try a different SOM, but I suspect I'll have the same issue (update: yes, same issue).

What DOS version do you use when you manually install Win98 from the MicroSD folder ? I have a Vortex86DX board, with an SD/IDE adapter, so not exactly the same thing as the Weecee, but I installed MS-DOS 7.1 (from Win98 SE) before installing Win98.

ockiller wrote on 2022-02-23, 08:15:

What DOS version do you use when you manually install Win98 from the MicroSD folder ?

I am booting up off the Win98SE OEM setup CD/USB. I can certainly try Dos-7.

That's weird, Windows 98 has always installed super easy for me.

Reset your BIOS back to default - the default settings work perfectly (you don't even need to select SD CARD in the BIOS - in fact that might even cause it to fail, ironically)

Clean any burned flux from around the SD card pins and the pins on the SOM, that can sometimes cause issues.

Also, maybe try booting from win98 CD/usb and repartitioning/reformatting the SD card from there, rather than formatting it from a modern PC. Maybe the formatting is messed up

Reset BIOS back to default, same issue. Surprised that it worked without setting the Pin Select in BIOS to SD, but as you said. Works fine set to Parallel IDE., too.

I dug my little scope out and put it on the thing to take a look if there is activity on the SD card transmission lines, and there is activity on each one, briefly, as it boots up and goes to start up the OS. Once it gets to the loading screen of Win98SE all SD card activity dies off and the lines go silent.

Also, I only do fdisk/format in Win98SE startup for Win98SE (for LBA support using FAT32), and Dos6.22 for Dos7.1 (for testing just as FAT16). Learned that lesson a long time ago. :3

Anyways, that's basically where I'm at. 😖

Question 1: is DOS 6.22 on a 2GB partition (you can go up to 4 partitions in 2gb+2gb+2gb+1.7gb fashion) working for you? Does it hang in all games? Please verify this before trying to debug many factors with win98se.

Question 2: where did you get the win98se image?

Dos 6.22 was on a FAT16 2GB partition (I also tried 512 MB for kicks), didn't work. Haven't really tried a whole lot of games yet, given I cannot even install an OS without it seemingly deciding it doesn't wanna. I'm sure they would work if they were reading off an image drive of some kind, but seems like main SD card activity is sketchy. Fdisk/format seem to work, drive seems to do dir correctly, Win98SE copies over files fine, but when it comes time to boot an OS and start making changes to the contents of the card, things get hairy.

Win98SE image from REMOVED. Went and tried a few others that I found around the net, all same issue. 😒

I don't know if this helps, but I'd like to share my experience at installing Windows 98 on a SD card, because I had some similar issues.

I don't want to write down all the attempts I've done in order to install the OS, but I figured out this: if I try to reinstall on the same SD card, even if I follow the procedure that works for me (remove the existing partition, fdisk to make a new active partition, format c: /s, fdisk /mbr, xcopy d:/win98 c:/win98 and setup.exe from c:/win98), it doesn't work anymore. It hangs up after the first reboot on "Getting ready to run Windows for the first time" or sometimes near the end with a blue screen.

If I follow the same steps above on a virtual machine, using my SD card as a virtual hard disk, the same error message on the upper-left corner appears or sometimes a blue screen with a disk error.
I also noticed that, when the installation doesn't work, the first step of setup.exe (copying files) is much slower, as if the computer found difficult to communicate with the SD card.

So, I used another new SD card and successfully installed Win98SE at the first attempt using the steps above.
I'm no expert and I know that it seems quite strange, but I suggest using a new SD card.
The old SD card still works (I installed MS DOS 6.22 without any issue) but I don't know why it can't be used for Win98 anymore, despite it can be formatted and repartitioned again.

I can provide a 32 gb raw image file for you, you can start from there, it'll remove one variable at least.
Gotta uninstall some software associated with cdkeys first (starcraft, bw)
I'll do it this evening.

I can do DOS later this afternoon, I have it with me at work.

I use win32diskimager for extraction/writing, on a modern win10 machine.

@Achernar, that's about the same behavior I'm seeing, also. I can get Dos 6.22 to at least fdisk and format /s the drive successfully, and copy over boot disk files, but nothing much beyond that. I guess it's at least something, but definitely not ideal by any stretch.

@Muon, no worries, I had pulled open my ubuntu install on my win10 box and installed VirtualBox there to convert the VDI disk file of a successful Win98 install in VirtualBox over to a raw image format, and used that to populate the SD Card using an image writer (such as win32diskimager), and same issue: it gets to the Win98 boot screen and dies out. I suspect even if I used an image you provided me it would do the same thing.

I have tried SD cards of 4GB, 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, and 512GB, and I have a 2GB card coming tomorrow just to verify that the SD class (SD SDHC SDXC etc) isn't at fault.

NachtRave wrote on 2022-02-23, 14:23:

and same issue: it gets to the Win98 boot screen and dies out. I suspect even if I used an image you provided me it would do the same thing.

Out of curiosity, does it boot in Safe mode ? It will use the BIOS routines rather than WIn98's IDE driver. Not sure what it will prove though.

NachtRave wrote on 2022-02-23, 14:23:

@Muon, no worries, I had pulled open my ubuntu install on my win10 box and installed VirtualBox there to convert the VDI disk file of a successful Win98 install in VirtualBox over to a raw image format, and used that to populate the SD Card using an image writer (such as win32diskimager), and same issue: it gets to the Win98 boot screen and dies out. I suspect even if I used an image you provided me it would do the same thing.

Yes worries, all my attempts at doing the install on a modern machine failed. Please try it, I'm happy to oblige.

Played around more in DOS mode, and was able to get Doom to at least run with PC sound (that came through the audio lines, hurray), but as I put Duke3D on it, now I'm getting a whole lot of "General failure reading drive C" errors. *le sigh* Just cannot win.

NachtRave wrote on 2022-02-23, 15:16:

Played around more in DOS mode, and was able to get Doom to at least run with PC sound (that came through the audio lines, hurray), but as I put Duke3D on it, now I'm getting a whole lot of "General failure reading drive C" errors. *le sigh* Just cannot win.

Slow your roll! Getting DOS games to run smoothly is a fiddly process even on a perfect machine.

Did you set up extended memory with duke3d? that's what it needs. It will fail with EMS (expanded memory).
Please post your autoexec.bat and config.sys

Just in case, are you using EMS / EMM386 / UMBs ? I have some weird behaviours sometimes when I use the high memory area.

Yup, I did. Emm386 NOEMS, all that HIGH,UMB stuff. I don't think it's an autoexec.bat/config.sys issue, I just think the SD card isn't working. 😖