I've been tinkering with getting Windows 98SE on a designed-for-XP laptop. My specs are as follows:

Model: Gateway 600YG2
Processor: Intel® Pentium 4™-M CPU 2.6 GHz
Ram: 256MB 266 MHz DDR-SDRAM
Graphics Controller: ATI Mobility Radeon 9500, 64MB of VRAM
Sound: Allegro ESS ES1988 chipset (SB compatible)
LCD Display: 15.7-inch active matrix (TFT) LCD color display
Hard drive: 128GB Serial-ATA driver
Disk Drive: 3.5" floppy and DVD+/RW
Ethernet: 10/100 Standard
Wifi: Broadcom BCM94306 IEEE802.11g network card
Expansion: 2 Type III PCMCIA Cardbus Slots, 2 USB 2.0, 1 Parallel, 1 Serial, 1 VGA, 1 S-Video
BIOS: Phoenix BIOS

I was able to find working drivers and test most every component, and they seem to be stable when running most basic programs as well as 2D games (tested: Age of Empires and Starcraft work fine). I installed 2 custom drivers, the ATI Omega drivers for the GPU as well as Broadcom Wifi Drivers from here: https://retrosystemsrevival.blogspot.com/2018 … windows-9x.html

My issue occurs when I'm running a 3D game, the game usually starts off fine and after a few minutes of playing it starts to stutter a bit, the game freezes, and then the entire laptop shuts down. No BSOD, no error message, no logging (that I can find), just a complete system shutdown.

I've done some troubleshooting that might give some hints on what is wrong, but it has been tough to nail down.

First it started with Monster Truck Madness 2. I ran the game with Direct 3D Hardware Acceleration on. I was using (at the time) DirectX 8.1. I fiddled with settings, turning on-and-off AGP features and still got the same crash. I then turned off DirectX hardware acceleration, ran it entirely in software rendering mode and it still crashed. I ran it again with DirectX 9.0c, and it still crashed.

I ran the same tests using Motocross Madness and got the same results.

Next I ran Unreal Tournament. I started with UT 1.0. When it tried to detect my hardware, it only wanted me to use Software Rendering, not recognizing my ATI. However, I overrode that setting, using DirectX settings. Interestingly, I was able to run the game seemingly without issue for about a half hour. Then I (stupidly) upgraded it to the GOTY version. This time it DID recognize my ATI card in initial setup, and I used DirectX rendering. The game ran for roughly 30 seconds, starting smoothly, stuttering, and shutting down the entire system. If anyone out there knows the main differences between the 2 UT versions that might be some help to understanding why one worked and the other didn't.

I thought it might be the graphics card, but software rendering for some of these games crashes the system as well, so I was thinking maybe a processor/chipset issue. But then I ran UT, and running on DirectX for one version of the game keeps it alive and the other crashes it.

The only other lead I might have is that the Broadcom wifi driver allegedly causes some system instability, potentially causing a system resource conflict, which I don't know how to manually resolve (I'm no expert in the IRQ-DMA stuff, a bit before my time), but that might be something someone here can help me with. So if anyone has any ideas, please let me know!