What mainboard is it? You might be able to get the drivers from the website.

Same goes for ATI and Nvidia.

Checking. It needs 5 minutes just to power up. Everything on the motherboard is on AGP or PCI respectively (video, sound and network). Nothing onboard. will I need to manually install drivers for these cards or can Win98 handle some of them by default?

Every Windows version since at least 95 has built-in drivers for some hardware, but the question is whether you want that convenience or if you wouldn't mind looking for newer versions online (which is not always the best thing to do, especially with old video cards, though).

Ha nice. Wmic says the motherboard is a Biostar M6TBA - http://www.motherboard.cz/mb/biostar/m6tba.htm

I've never heard of biostar up until now. guess i'll write down the model names and look for the drivers online.

ftp://ftp.biostar-usa.com/drivers/

ftp://ftp.biostar-usa.com/manuals/M6TBA/M6TBAmanual.pdf

The chipset is quite important. You need them, then also the drivers for the sound card, network card and graphics card.

It's not that many drivers to be honest 😀

PS: Chipset is Intel so this should be very easy...

Thanks for the link!

Several months later and I got my Win98 gaming computer working. It was a rough ride.

I had to change the sound card and the video card. Finding proper drivers was a nightmare (made more so by the fact that I couldn't get the USB interface to work, making data transfer much harder). But I finally got a TNT M64 and a pci sound card to work

My current issue now are with audio CDs. Win98SE won't play them. The volume is enabled and set on high, the CD-Rom works and does its thing while CD Player (win98's default audio cd program) will detect and play the tracks but nothing is heard. dxdiag and Device Manager all look ok

This issue is bothersome when I try to play games. I get the issue on both Windows and dos based games. Any suggestions?

Could this be related to a missing audio cable??
I'm not sure though, I always just use one in a build whenever I can.

Yes that's likely the issue 😀

Get that audio cable that goes from the back of the CD drive to the Sound Card. Also set the Audio mixer so that Audio CD is mixed through.

Lol yeah it was missing an audio cable. I had no idea it needed those. I found a replacement one and it works perfectly now.

thank you!