That's sort of strange. Which version of 98? AFAIK 98 SE was when they added support for DVDs.

I actually suggest getting two drives, a DVD-ROM and a CD-RW like in mine. I've got a 16x DVD for the rare W98-compatible DVD game, and file transfer, and a 52x32x52x CD-RW for CDROM games. I usually do this as those DVD/CDRW combo drives usually have slower CD read speeds, but that's just me.

Win98 SE. I have a spare CDRW drive I can swap out, guess there's really no need for a DVD drive for that OS.

buckeye wrote:

W98 shows the drive as a CDRW but not DVD if that means anything.

What exactly happens when you put a DVD in?

Sometimes when a drive "fails" a speed test for an older game, it's because the drive is much too fast; it's possible the loading is slow for another reason. In any case, I am skeptical that putting in a CDRW drive will improve matters.

Do you have UDMA enabled for the drive? That will require an 80-pin IDE cable and the Intel Application Accelerator. I recall that Windows 98 has a nasty habit of disabling UDMA if you ever try to read a bad disc; in such a case you have to make a registry edit to re-enable UDMA.

I think the Intel Application Accelerator package is for later chipsets; the 400 series has the INF Update Utility and the Bus Master IDE driver I guess included in it.

I'm pretty sure I was using that on my old ASUS P2L97.

Swapped the DVD combo drive out for a CDRW drive and XWA works fine. I don't get it, DMA was enabled, other games worked fine with it. I do remember replacing the IDE ribbon cables for some off-brand round ones but if that was the issue all games would be affected.

Something else to note. Daemon tools is installed and though it's software it uses a drive letter"G", also in device manager it shows a generic DVD drive as one of the optical drives along with the CDRW. Don't know if this is a factor or not.

The other likely culprit would be something in your Upperfilters and Lowerfilters registry keys; there is much about this on the Internet. Swapping out a drive would also result in clearing those.