VivienM wrote on 2025-02-05, 02:49:

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-04, 15:00:

nd22 wrote on 2025-02-04, 12:09:

The most powerful Win 9X system I have is actually a period correct one: Pentium 3 1400, Abit ST6, 512mb RAM, geforce3 ti 500, 80gb PATA HDD, Sound blaster live.

Is that period correct though? The 1400 was released after WinXP was out and was more of a workstation/server CPU than a gaming CPU.

Gamers stuck to 98SE well into 2002 or 2003... while everybody else got off the sinking 98SE ship with Win2000 if they could.

I think same, though according to my gut feeling I would draw the line closer to 2004..
I mean, considering that Windows 9x was being officially supported until July 2006 (!) and that Vista was released soon after in 2007.

I wonder how many held out on Windows 98SE in order to skip Windows XP..
I mean those kind of people who didn't like the colourful Windows XP UI and loved the simplicity of Windows 9x.

Hm. Now that I think of it, it probably were the multi-core processors that made some people switch to NT line.
On an older Pentium IV, you could disable Hyper-Threading and have one CPU back.
On the Athlon X2 processors this wasn't easily being done.

Edit: Radio amateurs also did cling on to DOS-based Windows line for long time.
This was also because they had used custom homebrew hardware that had to be "bit-banged" with.

Like a transistor on a serial port pin to drive the transmit pin on a two-way radio transceiver.
(Or worse, the use of parallel port, which Windows has no proper API for).

Others had, say, rotator controller cards (8-Bit ISA card) that their 10+years old DOS or Windows 3.1 programs had to directly talk to via i/o port writes.

Back in the day, I often was annoyed by this quick&dirty approach of running antique software on modern Windows.
I never got to understand why those old people didn't run proper MS-DOS 6.22 in Virtual PC or something.

But since I began seeing Windows 98SE as a big V86 VM w/ a Windows API as a gimmick on top (a bit like Windows/386) I got much calmer on this topic. 😁

Jo22 wrote on 2025-02-05, 03:01:

VivienM wrote on 2025-02-05, 02:49:

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-04, 15:00:

Is that period correct though? The 1400 was released after WinXP was out and was more of a workstation/server CPU than a gaming CPU.

Gamers stuck to 98SE well into 2002 or 2003... while everybody else got off the sinking 98SE ship with Win2000 if they could.

I think same, though according to my gut feeling I would draw the line closer to 2004..
I mean, considering that Windows 9x was being officially supported until July 2006 (!) and that Vista was released soon after in 2007.

I was going to say more around 2004, Even small to mid sized businesses I was I supporting were using Win98.
Company's would often not bother upgrading the OS to avid the licencing cost and a 5 year old P3 that had Win98 installed was fine for basic office use.
Only when those P3's were finally replaced with P4's with XP preinstalled XP take hold of the office.

I know many small/mid-sized companies that went from Win9x to XP skipping Windows 2000 and earlier on desktops.

What I never thought about was how close the end of 9x and start of Vista was! although that was also an OS most people skipped entirely.

Throw on something like Xonotic 0.1.0 or Nexuiz 2.5.1 if you really want to put your 2006-era Win98 hardware to the test.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:02:

I've been working with my retro PCs a lot more over the last week or so (I've had a bad cold so not much else to do) and keep coming back to the rationalisation that have accumulated more than I either end up actually using, or have a particular emotional attachment to.

That cold must have come with a fever - that's not rational thoughts 🤣

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:47:

Western Digital Raptor X 10k RPM HDD with see-thru side:

They definetely did not produce enough of those! Soooo beautiful!

H3nrik V! wrote on 2025-02-05, 09:59:

They definetely did not produce enough of those! Soooo beautiful!

True. I had two in RAID 0 back in the day, but one died. But I am back to two now, as I aquired another on ebay a few years ago. They make an interesting showpiece. Though, in reality, you don't see the head doing big movements that often. Unless you are defragging it or something. I like the sound they make.

DEAT wrote on 2025-02-05, 05:17:

Throw on something like Xonotic 0.1.0 or Nexuiz 2.5.1 if you really want to put your 2006-era Win98 hardware to the test.

Was Nexuiz a popular game? I did animations for some of their player models when it was just a Quake 3 mod in 2002-2004ish.

~~~~

With a 6000 series Nvidia card you can run Doom 3 & similar.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:02:

In theory, this should play pretty much anything that will on Win98, right?

But in practice, I find myself either using the older PIII 450 system with Radeon 9250, Yamaha YMF724 and PicoGUS for DOS and 2D strategy games etc, OR my AMD A8 APU smallest-possible ITX box under XP for most Windows based 3D games.

Unnecessary overkill for DOS, not the best for early 200x games and a budget chipset from squarely in the middle of the capacitor plague.

A Tough life for that system.

chinny22 wrote on 2025-02-05, 03:54:

I was going to say more around 2004, Even small to mid sized businesses I was I supporting were using Win98. Company's would oft […]
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Jo22 wrote on 2025-02-05, 03:01:

VivienM wrote on 2025-02-05, 02:49:

Gamers stuck to 98SE well into 2002 or 2003... while everybody else got off the sinking 98SE ship with Win2000 if they could.

I think same, though according to my gut feeling I would draw the line closer to 2004..
I mean, considering that Windows 9x was being officially supported until July 2006 (!) and that Vista was released soon after in 2007.

I was going to say more around 2004, Even small to mid sized businesses I was I supporting were using Win98.
Company's would often not bother upgrading the OS to avid the licencing cost and a 5 year old P3 that had Win98 installed was fine for basic office use.
Only when those P3's were finally replaced with P4's with XP preinstalled XP take hold of the office.

I know many small/mid-sized companies that went from Win9x to XP skipping Windows 2000 and earlier on desktops.

What I never thought about was how close the end of 9x and start of Vista was! although that was also an OS most people skipped entirely.

Thinking about it more, there's also Me in the picture. If you got a laptop in Aug./Sept. 2001, Me is what you got...

In particular, I know my mom got a laptop in Sept. 2001, it came with Me, had 128 megs of RAM which I upgraded to 256 a little later thanks to some surplus RAM from my laptop. I am pretty sure I upgraded that laptop to XP at some point, then she got a new Core Duo Yonah machine in 2006 that ran XP, but I am trying to remember when I would have upgraded it.

It's somewhat incredible actually - I hated, hated, hated 9x by 2001 - people have heard me talk about it endlessly, but the way you'd run out of system resources when multitasking was just unbearable by 2001 or so. And yet... somehow... I think my mom had a 9x-based machine until at least 2003 or 2004.

So... yeah, lots of 9x machines purchased in 2000/2001 probably never got upgraded to XP. Why spend the money, etc, especially if you didn't really have an optimal amount of RAM for XP? (And XP loved, loved, loved its RAM...)

douglar wrote on 2025-02-05, 21:19:

justin1985 wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:02:

In theory, this should play pretty much anything that will on Win98, right?

But in practice, I find myself either using the older PIII 450 system with Radeon 9250, Yamaha YMF724 and PicoGUS for DOS and 2D strategy games etc, OR my AMD A8 APU smallest-possible ITX box under XP for most Windows based 3D games.

Unnecessary overkill for DOS, not the best for early 200x games and a budget chipset from squarely in the middle of the capacitor plague.

A Tough life for that system.

Overkill for DOS? Naaaa... I've got a PicoGUS in my P4 D 3.4GHz system.

fosterwj03 wrote on 2025-02-06, 02:13:

douglar wrote on 2025-02-05, 21:19:

Unnecessary overkill for DOS, not the best for early 200x games and a budget chipset from squarely in the middle of the capacitor plague.

A Tough life for that system.

Overkill for DOS? Naaaa... I've got a PicoGUS in my P4 D 3.4GHz system.

I was a bit thrown by this comment too, but then I thought perhaps @douglar was refering to the Socket 754 Sempron on VIA K8M800 chipset? That is far more capacitor plague era than Slot 1, right? (I have checked thoroughly though, and it looks fine, although the GeForce 4 did need some bulging caps replacing).

In fact, the Siemens Slot1 board has entirely Siemens branded capacitors, which seems really unusual! (And they're all in great condition, at least visually).

Capacitor plague was from Taiwan sourced capacitors, used on boards like Gigabyte.. as well as graphics cards like you said.

MSI is Taiwan so that board is vunerable to it too..

I used Windows ME from 2000 to 2004 on my systems, well into the XP era, and it ran excellent as long as the hardware was up to it!
The first system I installed Windows ME on was unstable as hell : Duron 750, 128mb of ram that I upgraded to 256mb when SDRAM prices plunged and the POS that was the Lucky star K7VAT board - I still have bad dreams about it! Tried 98Se, ME and XP and it bluescreened every single day! I remember when i changed mobo to Abit KR7A in 2002- the system became rock solid despite using the same CPU and GPU! I used ME again on the next system and it ran exceptionally well on it - Duron 1300, 256mb DDR and Abit KR7a - in fact it scored higher than XP in 3dmark 2000 and 2001.
XP loves memory and back in the day DDR was expensive so for me ME was a natural choice 😀!
I will probably get banned for saying it but I did not encountered any serious problems with ME! It just ran and I used it more than 98.
I switched to XP in 2004 when I bought Athlon 64 and 512mb of ram and to this day I still consider it the best version of Windows ever; but you need lots of ram for it - 512 is the bare minimum.

There are a lot of PII boards with bloated capacitors. Probably dependent on how much the board was used and the cooling system. Many cases of that era had nonexistent airflow. My PIII rig will be switching to a P4 case for that reason.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:05:

Mostly for playing games at 1600x1200 with AA and AF cranked up. You'd need something a bit stronger to fully max that out though, like a Radeon X800 series card.

Also, there are a few Win9x era games with insanely high CPU requirements. The most notable example being the original Deus Ex.

^this^

Smooth as frick 1600x1200 maxed out win9x gaming.

justin1985 wrote on 2025-02-02, 13:02:

AMD Sempron 3300+ Socket 754 MSI K8M800 based mATX board, 1Gb DDR GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64Mb SoundBlaster Live! […]
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AMD Sempron 3300+ Socket 754
MSI K8M800 based mATX board, 1Gb DDR
GeForce 4 Ti 4200 64Mb
SoundBlaster Live!

In theory, this should play pretty much anything that will on Win98, right?

But in practice, I find myself either using the older PIII 450 system with Radeon 9250, Yamaha YMF724 and PicoGUS for DOS and 2D strategy games etc, OR my AMD A8 APU smallest-possible ITX box under XP for most Windows based 3D games.

Heh, I've got similar three systems! 🤣

Late Win98:
Asus K8V-MX (VIA K8M800 + VT8237R) with 512MB DDR
AMD Sempron 3100+ (Socket 754)
Gigabyte GV-R96P256D (Radeon 9600 Pro)
Sound Blaster Live! Value
60GB HDD

Early Win98 / VERY late DOS:
Gigabyte GA-6VXC7-4X-P (VIA VT82C694X + VT82C686B) with 256MB SDR
Intel Pentium III 800EB (Socket 370)
Gigabyte GV-R9000 PRO II (Radeon 9000)
Sound Blaster Live! Platinum
60GB HDD

WinXP:
Gigabyte GA-P31-ES3G (P31 + ICH7) with 4GB DDR2
Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 (LGA775)
Asus EAH5670/DI/1GD5 (Radeon HD 5670)
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
120GB SSD

In practice I use the late Win98 build more often than other two builds combined as it can run just about every Win9x game (particularly those incompatible with WinXP's NT core) at 1600 x 1200 resolution, just like Joseph_Joestar said. In contrast I don't have many early- to mid-XP games (due to my personal career path) while the older Socket 370 build is reserved for 3D-accelerated DOS games (unfortunately I don't have any Voodoo) or earlier Win9x games that don't run well on AGP 8x Radeon 9600, but there are simply not many of them. IMHO it's just personal preference / experience that dictates which build is the most convenient.

chinny22 wrote on 2025-02-05, 03:54:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-02-05, 03:01:

I think same, though according to my gut feeling I would draw the line closer to 2004..
I mean, considering that Windows 9x was being officially supported until July 2006 (!) and that Vista was released soon after in 2007.

I was going to say more around 2004, Even small to mid sized businesses I was I supporting were using Win98.

Ditto. Intel 915 chipset, PCIe, DDR2, LGA775, Socket 939, all debuted in mid-2004; many of them started dropping off Win9x supports.

The Win98 emperors have arrived (in terms of speed, that is). Testing will be done in RyZen. The goal is to achieve a world record in Win98 3DMark01.

DarthSun wrote on 2025-03-07, 12:43:

The Win98 emperors have arrived (in terms of speed, that is). Testing will be done in RyZen. The goal is to achieve a world reco […]
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The Win98 emperors have arrived (in terms of speed, that is). Testing will be done in RyZen. The goal is to achieve a world record in Win98 3DMark01.

And the Win98/3DM01 world record was born: