DudeFace wrote on 2024-10-22, 13:26:

daeds wrote on 2024-10-22, 12:41:

DudeFace wrote on 2024-10-22, 12:22:

the 6600 is obviously more powerful, i know after the 5 series you lose 8 bit paletted textures and table fog, i assume this is present on the TNT2, if thats important to you, go for the TNT2 especially as your cpu is under 2ghz, both should have good compatibility for DOS, personally i'd upgrade the cpu to 2.8ghz and use the 6600gt, for sound card a sound blaster live is a good choice, an audigy 2 is the better card especially if you want higher than EAX2, but under dos SB16 probably sounds just the same on both cards, if you want a cheap card that has accurate OPL3, a C-media CMI8738 can be had for peanuts.

for installing 98 i use a boot cd instead of a floppy, if you source one make sure it includes ramdrive, there are iso's out there for win98 and win M.e, you could use a usb drive and copy setup files to your hdd, i dont bother, a boot cd is the quickest and simplist option for me, for hdd i just use one partition, limit is 137gb, stay under that you should be fine, anything more you'll need Rloew's patch.

Thanks for the input! 😀
I think my cd drives are dead, that's why I must go the usb way for now atleast, until I get another working one. I already have a partition on my HDD with the win98 setup, going to use a bootable USB pen with MS-DOS and WINME fdisk to format c: and sys c:, then, again with the bootable dos pen, I should be able to navigate to the I: partition and install windows, right? 😁

i'v e never installed windows that way so cant really advise, since swapping a boot floppy for a cd its never been easier, i have got an old laptop with a dead cd drive so i may have to install from hdd to get it working again, as for boot disks, i've used an M.e one for 98 but i remember there was something that was incompatible, i think it was scandisk related i forget now, it didnt stop me installing/running 98, but it did show someting in windows stating it was using a different version that was incompatible, it wasn't a serious issue, for 98 i use 80-120gb hdd's for Os so i dont have to bother with patches for larger drives, if i need extra space for games i just use a 2nd hdd, the other reason is if my Os screws up and i need to re-install, i dont have to transfer all my games off first.

Yeah, I've so far have partitioned the disk into smaller 32gb fat32 chunks, let's see how it goes when the SATA2IDE adapter arrives.

daeds wrote on 2024-10-22, 14:21:

Yeah, I've so far have partitioned the disk into smaller 32gb fat32 chunks, let's see how it goes when the SATA2IDE adapter arrives.

32gb is quite small, you'll fill it pretty quickly, i'd just go for the max size with Rloews patch, regarding the hdd limit of 137gb, i think if you have a hdd larger than that like a 160gb for instance, you're supposed to make a partition less than 137gb and leave the rest unallocated, even if you make a bunch of smaller partitions i think windows has trouble with anything over the first 137gb, so using anything over that can cause corruption without Rloews patch, or so i have read, someone with experience with this will have to chime in if im wrong.

Regarding bottlenecking, Ive done some testing around that era of card and its probably not too far off where the bottlenecks are.

for example a 1.6Ghz P4 and a 3.0Ghz P4 both get around Quake 3 95-100FPS with a Radeon 9250 (so GPU bottle neck)
with a Radeon 9800 pro (256/256), the 1.6 got 121FPS and the 3.0 got 215FPS

So the bottleneck is somewhere in that range. Looking at the specs of the 6600 vs the 9250 and 9800pro, its probably closer to the righ range than you'd think - that being said I dont own one to actually test it.

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later
Although fdisk is used to create the partitions if your keeping the existing 32GB partitions you'll probably not need fdisk at all.

However you'll need a win98 bootdisk when you want to run the sys command, as it'll "install" the same OS as the boot disk.

Yes you should be able to access I:\ or any other partitions on the hard drive if you use a bootdisk, just as long as they are fat32 partitions of course!

I agree 32GB might be a bit tight. I've a Win98/2k PIII with a couple of 40GB SCSI drives and have had to split the games over 2 drives, but as long as you come up with a system it's not a big deal.
(in my case dos games on 1 drive Win9x on the other)

chinny22 wrote on 2024-10-22, 23:59:

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later Although fdisk is used to create […]
Show full quote

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later
Although fdisk is used to create the partitions if your keeping the existing 32GB partitions you'll probably not need fdisk at all.

However you'll need a win98 bootdisk when you want to run the sys command, as it'll "install" the same OS as the boot disk.

Yes you should be able to access I:\ or any other partitions on the hard drive if you use a bootdisk, just as long as they are fat32 partitions of course!

I agree 32GB might be a bit tight. I've a Win98/2k PIII with a couple of 40GB SCSI drives and have had to split the games over 2 drives, but as long as you come up with a system it's not a big deal.
(in my case dos games on 1 drive Win9x on the other)

Thanks, that's what I'll do. The WINME fdisk is already installed in the dos bootable pen I have, by default, so I should be golden, I can run sys from the windows98 install folder aswell, am I right? Sorry for all the questions but it's been a while! 😁

In regards to upgrading CPUs... if you do, do a bit of research on the games first that you intend to have on the system. There are a few that are CPU speed-sensitive, like Need For Speed Porsche 2000 / Porsche Unleashed (with this one, the text in the menus starts to appear garbled and also the in-game textures get reduced to the lowest, so the game ends up looking quite potato.) In regards to NFS:PU, I'm not 100% certain about what CPU speed (and above) caused it, but I can confirm it's an issue on my 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Prescott. IIRC, ~2 GHz was the threshold. That reminds me, I need to test it on one of my 2 GHz Northwood P4 CPUs to confirm. What I really like about the 2 GHz P4 Northwoods is that they are quite low-power (around 50W under load) - not quite the levels of P3, but not anywhere near the high-clocked P4's. If I remember, one of my P4 rigs with this CPU would pull just shy of 80W from the wall under max CPU load, which is quite a bit lower than my 2.8 GHz P4s that suck around 110-130 Watts.
So my point is, if you want a cooler-running P4, ditch the 1.6 Willamate for a low-end Northwood... provided none of the games you want to play will have issue with the higher CPU clocks. Alternatively, keep the Willy - these make for pretty well-compatible Win98 rigs, and IIRC the TDP on the Willy isn't that much higher than the NW until you start picking at the "high-end" Willys. 😁

momaka wrote on 2024-10-23, 07:40:

In regards to upgrading CPUs... if you do, do a bit of research on the games first that you intend to have on the system. There are a few that are CPU speed-sensitive, like Need For Speed Porsche 2000 / Porsche Unleashed (with this one, the text in the menus starts to appear garbled and also the in-game textures get reduced to the lowest, so the game ends up looking quite potato.) In regards to NFS:PU, I'm not 100% certain about what CPU speed (and above) caused it, but I can confirm it's an issue on my 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 Prescott. IIRC, ~2 GHz was the threshold. That reminds me, I need to test it on one of my 2 GHz Northwood P4 CPUs to confirm. What I really like about the 2 GHz P4 Northwoods is that they are quite low-power (around 50W under load) - not quite the levels of P3, but not anywhere near the high-clocked P4's. If I remember, one of my P4 rigs with this CPU would pull just shy of 80W from the wall under max CPU load, which is quite a bit lower than my 2.8 GHz P4s that suck around 110-130 Watts.
So my point is, if you want a cooler-running P4, ditch the 1.6 Willamate for a low-end Northwood... provided none of the games you want to play will have issue with the higher CPU clocks. Alternatively, keep the Willy - these make for pretty well-compatible Win98 rigs, and IIRC the TDP on the Willy isn't that much higher than the NW until you start picking at the "high-end" Willys. 😁

Awesome info right here, thanks a lot! I think this is just the start of my collecting, I already collect old tech but more consoles and games, just one more thing to look for when I go "shopping" 😁

Also there are full blown desktop socket 478 CPU's on laptops, like the 1.8ghz Northwood P4. I'm pretty sure they are lower TDP, and have some power saving features baked in + go up to 2.4ghz at least with a 400fsb. The laptop I just bought has a 1.8ghz and 1.2ghz toggle setting in the bios, which is neato.

ODwilly wrote on 2024-10-23, 09:21:

Also there are full blown desktop socket 478 CPU's on laptops, like the 1.8ghz Northwood P4. I'm pretty sure they are lower TDP, and have some power saving features baked in + go up to 2.4ghz at least with a 400fsb. The laptop I just bought has a 1.8ghz and 1.2ghz toggle setting in the bios, which is neato.

Socket 478 Pentium 4 in laptops is a source of confusion, as there was something called Mobile Pentium 4-M (lower TDP, 400MHz FSB up to 2.6GHz), then Mobile Pentium 4 (without the -M), then Mobile Pentium 4 HT (with HyperThreading), the latter had 533MHz FSB, could go over 3GHz, and had rather insane, almost desktop-like TDP. And all were using the same Socket 478. It's all here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … bile_processors

dr_st wrote on 2024-10-23, 12:13:

ODwilly wrote on 2024-10-23, 09:21:

Also there are full blown desktop socket 478 CPU's on laptops, like the 1.8ghz Northwood P4. I'm pretty sure they are lower TDP, and have some power saving features baked in + go up to 2.4ghz at least with a 400fsb. The laptop I just bought has a 1.8ghz and 1.2ghz toggle setting in the bios, which is neato.

Socket 478 Pentium 4 in laptops is a source of confusion, as there was something called Mobile Pentium 4-M (lower TDP, 400MHz FSB up to 2.6GHz), then Mobile Pentium 4 (without the -M), then Mobile Pentium 4 HT (with HyperThreading), the latter had 533MHz FSB, could go over 3GHz, and had rather insane, almost desktop-like TDP. And all were using the same Socket 478. It's all here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_P … bile_processors

I had a full blown 17inch desktop replacement Gateway laptop with a Socket 478 3.06/1mb/533fsb HT Prescott. Would have been a neat machine if it had something better than the Extreme 2 IGP. The amount of heat and airflow that thing put out was insane, and it weighed a good 12 pounds.

daeds wrote on 2024-10-23, 07:03:

chinny22 wrote on 2024-10-22, 23:59:

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later Although fdisk is used to create […]
Show full quote

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later
Although fdisk is used to create the partitions if your keeping the existing 32GB partitions you'll probably not need fdisk at all.

However you'll need a win98 bootdisk when you want to run the sys command, as it'll "install" the same OS as the boot disk.

Yes you should be able to access I:\ or any other partitions on the hard drive if you use a bootdisk, just as long as they are fat32 partitions of course!

I agree 32GB might be a bit tight. I've a Win98/2k PIII with a couple of 40GB SCSI drives and have had to split the games over 2 drives, but as long as you come up with a system it's not a big deal.
(in my case dos games on 1 drive Win9x on the other)

Thanks, that's what I'll do. The WINME fdisk is already installed in the dos bootable pen I have, by default, so I should be golden, I can run sys from the windows98 install folder aswell, am I right? Sorry for all the questions but it's been a while! 😁

This won't work as the folder does not contain the boot files.
You can select a different source, say if you booted of a WinME CD on D:\ but had a Win98 boot floppy in drive A:\
typing sys c: a: would copy the boot files from A:\ ignoring the fact that you booted off D:\ but that's not going to help you here.
Easiest way would be to create a 2nd WIn98 bootable USB,
Boot from your WinME USB and use fdisk
reboot with your Win98 USB and either do a format c: /s or run sys separately, your choice. You can copy format and sys from the WinME USB if you like, it's not version specific

chinny22 wrote on 2024-10-24, 00:28:

This won't work as the folder does not contain the boot files. You can select a different source, say if you booted of a WinME […]
Show full quote

daeds wrote on 2024-10-23, 07:03:

chinny22 wrote on 2024-10-22, 23:59:

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later Although fdisk is used to create […]
Show full quote

Yes you can use a WinME bootdisk to run WinME, it wont matter your going to install WIn98 later
Although fdisk is used to create the partitions if your keeping the existing 32GB partitions you'll probably not need fdisk at all.

However you'll need a win98 bootdisk when you want to run the sys command, as it'll "install" the same OS as the boot disk.

Yes you should be able to access I:\ or any other partitions on the hard drive if you use a bootdisk, just as long as they are fat32 partitions of course!

I agree 32GB might be a bit tight. I've a Win98/2k PIII with a couple of 40GB SCSI drives and have had to split the games over 2 drives, but as long as you come up with a system it's not a big deal.
(in my case dos games on 1 drive Win9x on the other)

Thanks, that's what I'll do. The WINME fdisk is already installed in the dos bootable pen I have, by default, so I should be golden, I can run sys from the windows98 install folder aswell, am I right? Sorry for all the questions but it's been a while! 😁

This won't work as the folder does not contain the boot files.
You can select a different source, say if you booted of a WinME CD on D:\ but had a Win98 boot floppy in drive A:\
typing sys c: a: would copy the boot files from A:\ ignoring the fact that you booted off D:\ but that's not going to help you here.
Easiest way would be to create a 2nd WIn98 bootable USB,
Boot from your WinME USB and use fdisk
reboot with your Win98 USB and either do a format c: /s or run sys separately, your choice. You can copy format and sys from the WinME USB if you like, it's not version specific

Yeah, that's true. I can disconnect all my modern pc's hdds (so I don't mess it up) and just with the bootable win98SE cd do the sys to the disk I'm going to use in the old one, right? I have a cdrom that I can use on my modern pc. The bootable 98 usbs have been angry at me, already 2 dead usbs while using easy2boot, don't know why really.

Just had success, it seems.
I connected the hdd to my new machine and, with my dvd-drive I booted the 98se disk and did fdisk and then format c: /s and now the HDD can boot already.
I'm going to connect it to the old rig and install Windows from inside, the setup is inside the D: drive.
I will give feedback later! 😀

Damn, now everytime I install Windows it goes well, first boot it fails, saying that it cannot load KRNL386.EXE, access denied.
Any clues? Have already formatted and installed and the same happened. 🙁

It's working! After formatting everything and starting from 0,
Basically had to install to D: instead of C: where I did the sys, weird!
Play time!