@Muon

A broken 98SE install maybe?
try with a fresh 98 install when you are able.

I found a Feb 2022 backup and tried to rewrite that image back to my card. Same symptoms. It's time to remove that pesky polyfuse, it's probably tripping.

This is what I used earlier this year.
1.8A trip fuse.

https://www.mouser.ca/ProductDetail/576-0603L100SLYR

Edit:
Oh. I removed the Cr2330 battery I had since it wasn't doing anything for me anymore on a whim and I can stay in win98se now. Still have the fuse on. Was it interfering during voltage change spikes??

Anyway I tried to install the proposed patch, no change in behavior.

@Muon

Alrighty, thanks for trying.

@rasteri

Have you had a chance to try an IDE hard drive with the WeeCee?

@rasteri @nachtrave

I found this Vortex86DX BIOS here on VOGONS -

Re: Vortex86DX - A beastie of it's own (General info and discussion)

I'm curious if it's newer than the one the weecee has?

Hi everyone

I am considering building a primarily-DOS gaming PC inspired by the incredible WeeCee. My goal is to create an all-in-one that will have the maximum compatibility with the first 20 years of the PC platform—from 1981 to 2001. That’s both hardware (sound cards) and software (games) compatibility.

The challenges as far as I understand them are:

A. Older games driven by clock speed. Very surprised at Jazz Jackrabbit here.
B. The mess of early 3D, AGP, PCI, Glide, etc.
C. A large variety of sound cards, most of which are ISA.

Here are the changes I’m considering, and my reasoning for them. I would very much appreciate everyone’s insights.

1. Vortex86 SOM based. All-in-one, and keeps most of the nasty engineering inside the unit.
2. But based on the 86DX3 because of its PCIe and SATA support. (And higher Quake framerate 😀
3. PCIe slot, required to (optionally) add a PCIe graphics card. OpenGL is required to cover more games, including GliDOS support.
4. ISA slot, to add original sound card hardware.
5. Added HDMI for modern monitor support.
6. LPT port. Supports dongles and old printers.
7. Optional FPGA + RPi CM4 integration for hardware emulation.
8. MiniITX form factor. Small enough for me, broad case support. The Streacom is my personal target case.
9. Compact flash over IDE for drive support.
10. Floppy and IDE headers for original drives, or Gotek.

The FPGA + CM4 I think are required to reasonably cover all of the sound cards available, without purchasing individual sound cards. It also allows for some neat tricks like bridging from the WiFi to Ethernet, effectively allowing WiFi running under DOS. And, potentially, certain Bluetooth profiles, such as to support Bluetooth audio devices. By mediating the bus interactions through the FPGA (which has PCI support built in), it also makes it much easier for more developers to “augment the system”, because they can target development on the CM4, rather than the FPGA.

FPGA: I would go for the Cyclone IV, because that’s already well-used through the MiSTer FPGA project.

On the rear, I looking to add a variety of DB connectors, so that different interfaces can be built and patched through where required. For example, for gameport, midi MPU-401, CGA / EGA interfaces, etc.

Without original cards, the system would fit in a mini ITX low profile. But it would have the slots to support them. With an early-generation NVidia, you can get away without fans, so that system will run 100% silent.

Problems as I foresee them:

1. Cost. But it’s a single machine, rather than a few machines from that period to get broad support. Once you add in the various sound cards, original or reproduction, MPU401 interfaces, MT32s, the overall cost could be lower than multiple machines. Also depends on how your significant other feels about lots of noisy beige “space wasters” 😀

2. Windows 98. According to ICOP, not supported by the DX3 due to a lack of drivers. I’m awaiting clarification from them; has anyone here got enough of Windows 98 working? This is why I’m targeting Windows XP, which is supported. There’s a short list of games, though, that are win98 but not supported under XP; though many of them I think can be patched.

3. ATAPI support under DOS. I’ve seen https://shop.tattiebogle.net/product/prod_EkTnv3Tk2Trxhf, but that still has issues and seems stagnant. A smart FPGA developer could no doubt get things working though with this hardware design.

4. Current chip availability. The DX3 is available, the DX SOM is constrained. CM4’s pop up occasionally, but will be constrained for some time. RADxa might be an alternative, but the support on the Pi is definitely best-in-class.

I’ve not yet thought through adding a few additional bits, such as ADCs / DACs / DSPs. Let me know if I’m missing anything big.

@richarddb

Hi, welcome to VOGONS!

1. Vortex86 SOM based. All-in-one, and keeps most of the nasty engineering inside the unit.
2. But based on the 86DX3 because of its PCIe and SATA support. (And higher Quake framerate 😀

Sounds good, Vortex86 is a pretty good retro friendly CPU, SATA can work properly in 98 with rloew's drivers and PCIe is not an issue for win98.

3. PCIe slot, required to (optionally) add a PCIe graphics card. OpenGL is required to cover more games, including GliDOS support.

I'm trying something similar to this myself for a silent modern 98 build I'm gonna do - I'll be going with an ATI Radeon X300 SE 128MB PCIE GPU.

4. ISA slot, to add original sound card hardware.

That'll take up a lot of space, but adds flexibility.

5. Added HDMI for modern monitor support.

That would need to be done with converters if you're using hardware compatible with win98.

6. LPT port. Supports dongles and old printers.

These also take up alot of space.

7. Optional FPGA + RPi CM4 integration for hardware emulation.

What hardware do you want to emulate?

8. MiniITX form factor. Small enough for me, broad case support. The Streacom is my personal target case.

mATX might be a better option given what you're asking for.

9. Compact flash over IDE for drive support.

Sure, SATA SSDs are much faster though and will work with rloew's driver.

10. Floppy and IDE headers for original drives, or Gotek.

I recommend getting an iodd ST400 -

http://en.iodd.kr/wiki/index.php/Iodd-ST400#U … 8Virtual_FDD.29
Although it's USB win98 will work with that with a USB 2.0 driver, and the emulated FDD can boot DOS and let you disk swap too. The emulated ODD needs a USBCD.SYS driver to work in DOS though.

Thank you Duffman!

3. (PCIe) Is there any concern about Nvidia versus ATI in that era? I would imagine not, that they’re all largely OpenGL / DirectX, so the more modern differences like CUDA are irrelevant.

4. (ISA) Space: Yeah. I might go to mATX as you say, because mini-ITX cases with vertical space for cards are far less common.

5. (HDMI) For future-proofing, I think this is going to be increasingly required. The FPGA might have to play a role in upscaling the older video modes too; it’s sometimes impossible to find out what modes are even supported on monitors with “VGA”.

7. (FPGA) The general idea is “anything”, but I want MPU401, Adlib, and Soundblaster. See for example, https://github.com/eigenco/frankenpi. FPGA in general is a case of future-proofing, as it gradually becomes harder to get old hardware.

9. (IDE) You make me think: How long will CF be around? It could be convenient to have “removable” media that you can swap in / out, rather than trying to set up different multi boot profiles on a single drive. But my goal is long-term preservation and opening access to people who don’t want to hunt for increasingly scarce hardware, so I wouldn’t want to go CF just to see it die in a few years.

10. (ATAPI) Great link, thanks. IODD I would have excluded because it’s not clear it supports older USB specs, so good to hear that it does. But I think that still doesn’t solve the ATAPI problem?

Opions sought:

1. Windows XP with a new ZOTAC GeForce GT 710 1GB DDR3 PCIE x 1. Some win98 games will be problematic.

2. Windows 98se and older <256 MB graphics cards, second hand.

(I think this is why in the longer term the FPGA + CM4 is going to be required… to be able to create a “soft” GPU on the Broadcom using something like Mesa3D.)

3. (PCIe) There's a bug in nvidia's later 9x drivers to do with RAM or something, not sure, rloew wrote about it and made a patch - https://archive.org/details/PTCHNVSZ
I don't think ATI has the same issue - X800 series is the latest that can work on win98.

9. (IDE) CF will stick around for a long time, businesses still use it. CF is Parallelized flash though and gets no where near the speed of Serialized flash of SATA SSDs, I'd say use SATA SSDs whenever the option is available.

10. (ATAPI) I'd say we can bypass ATAPI CD/DVD-ROMs with the iodd ST400 I mentioned.

Is there a full PC104 equivalent to the SoC used in the WeeCee? I happen to have an old ESS PC104 sound card and would like to build something with more ports than a usual WeeCee. A little bit larger form factor is what I'm looking for, more akin to the Wee86.

I see these options which appear to be very similar:

Single board with PC104 slot:
https://www.wdlsystems.com/ICOP-VDX-6324RD-Vo … -FDD-40C-to-85C

Standard PC104:
https://www.wdlsystems.com/ICOP-VDX-6350RDE-V … odule-256MB-RAM

But it's rather hard to tell just how equivalent these are just from the specs. I mean more if they have a similar BIOS and options and don't have any "Gotchas", not ports wise. I can get ports from the spec sheets.

@Kayzar: I built my retro-PC with the exact SBC you linked, amazing board for this purpose: Another Vortex86 build

I don't own a weeCee, but it seems able to do everything a weeCee can, I successfully tested Win98 SE and a lot of games (Duke3D 1024x768, Second Reality demo, Quake, Tomb Raider, Half Life at 320x240, ...).

The differences that I spotted are that it seems to have half the L2 cache (128 kB, but still reported as 256 kB in the BIOS), and only write through policy supported. So it's several % slower than a weeCee. Also, it doesn't have the 16 and 32 frequency dividers, but on the weeCee they are not real dividers (I don't know what those modes do to slow down the system further, wait states?, and it doesn't seem to make a difference once the caches are disabled).

It's now mounted on a micro ATX case, with a CD-ROM drive and a floppy drive, also with 4 USB ports, and an ISA sound card. I really like this specific board for the flexibility it provides, you can build something that looks like an average 90s PC with all the peripherals, and without any soldering to do 😀.

Edit: I just saw that you linked the "Extended Temperature operating range" model, which I think is just the same model but limited to 600 MHz instead of 800 MHz.

The quality of the documentation is not great, so I cannot confirm that the DX3 variant supports the same clock divisions. Has anyone else tried slowing down the DX3?

I’ve also asked about the DX2 variant, which might solve both PCIe and Win98. But I suspect they don’t have supported graphics drivers for anything before WinXP.

richarddb wrote on 2022-11-18, 19:43:

The quality of the documentation is not great, so I cannot confirm that the DX3 variant supports the same clock divisions. Has anyone else tried slowing down the DX3?

The DX3 BIOS I've used doesn't support clock division.

Hello,
A few days ago I finally finished my own weeCee, it's a great thing and I thank the author very much for his work. But still a few things bother me about this project.

1. Why was micro usb used? In my opinion it is a very inappropriate connector for power. Why wasn't a DC Jack connector used? Finding a suitable adapter is not easy.

2. The micro usb, usb and VGA port connectors are too close together. I already had a problem with the space.

Next, I would have some minor questions.

1. The processor has over 50 C, is this normal?
2. When copying files the system (Windows 98 SE) can freeze for a few seconds, it's a strange behavior. Does this happen to anyone else?

@Vridek

1. On this point I agree, a DC power jack would be a much better choice, more amps and more solid connection too. It was rasteri's choice to use it as it's what the raspberry pi uses.
2. rasteri wanted to save even more space from his earlier wee86 build, but needed to have the connectors, so they got squeezed in.

---

1. given that the SOM is passively cooled it's bound to get warm - I'm guessing 50C is safe.
2. That's the IDE issue which I'm hoping to solve once my WeeCee arrives in a few days.

Vridek wrote on 2022-11-19, 17:14:

2. When copying files the system (Windows 98 SE) can freeze for a few seconds, it's a strange behavior. Does this happen to anyone else?

Yeah, it happens to all of us. A good dozen solutions have been tried but they've all failed.

I noticed something whilst setting up my ASRock QC6000M build earlier today.

In my case 98SE refused to install at all until I set the LBA flag on the BOOT partition.
I don't know if this applies in the case of the WeeCee, but has anyone tested to see if setting that flag makes a difference?

The QC6000M works really well with 98SE BTW, so far only the motherboard audio lacks a driver, I've gone around that with an Audigy RX (Audigy 4 over PCI-E) and the Audigy 2 drivers work well with it after I added the AudigyRX HWID to the INF.
ACPI works too, so plenty of IRQs.
Even the iGPU on the CPU works with ATI's last driver for 98, that was surprising!

edit: I was mistaken with the iGPU - it's not actually working correctly.

Since I'm still waiting on my WeeCee to arrive I figured whilst I wait I'd post some drivers early for anyone who wants to test them.

rloew's TBPLUS - link: attached

Extract then run
INSTALL.BAT C:\WINDOWS
Reboot then go into BIOS and change OnBoard IDE Operate Mode from Legacy to Native mode then save and restart.
boot win98SE

WeeCee3D - link: https://ufile.io/57fx8bp2

A Hacked XGI driver test to see if 3D was disabled at either the driver level or silicon level.

Extract
Run XGIRun.exe
Install Hacked XGI driver.

Test a Direct3D or OpenGL game with this driver.

Duffman wrote on 2022-12-04, 08:27:

Since I'm still waiting on my WeeCee to arrive I figured whilst I wait I'd post some drivers early for anyone who wants to test […]
Show full quote

Since I'm still waiting on my WeeCee to arrive I figured whilst I wait I'd post some drivers early for anyone who wants to test them.

rloew's TBPLUS - link: attached

Extract then run
INSTALL.BAT C:\WINDOWS
Reboot then go into BIOS and change OnBoard IDE Operate Mode from Legacy to Native mode then save and restart.
boot win98SE

WeeCee3D - link: https://ufile.io/57fx8bp2

A Hacked XGI driver test to see if 3D was disabled at either the driver level or silicon level.

Extract
Run XGIRun.exe
Install Hacked XGI driver.

Test a Direct3D or OpenGL game with this driver.

My hardware is SOM304RD52VINE1 and it's not working.