First post, by ty8rown
Hi! Not entirely sure where to post this question since I'm new here. I recently got a retro PC and I've been running Windows 98SE on it. Most games I have for it work fine, but now I'm a bit stuck because I also want to play Final Fantasy 7 with the New Threat mod with some of the other enhancements like the 60fps fix for example. New Threat by itself works (Had to install it from Windows 10 into my CF card), but none of the other mods do, like the custom OpenGL driver and the 60fps fix. Stuff like The Reunion refuses to install directly on Win98 because it expects newer than Windows 98SE and the installer fails when I try to use KernelEX, and of course none of the changes were working when I ran it after installing from Windows 10. Then there are things like hardware support. I heard my sound card loses features starting with NT (Looking towards Win2000 with latest SP), but I can't find exact information regarding my hardware, also I suspect the hardware I have might also be a bit past the Win98 era or in some weird grey area in the middle that has both pros and cons for each OS, but my hardware choices were because of the platform I have, especially the CPU. Here are my specs if anyone can help me out.
MOBO: Intel D850GB (Has a spot for PC/PCI, no pins on it. I had plans to add those so I can use SB-Link in the future, but probably won't now)
CPU: Pentium 4 1.3Ghz
RAM: 256MB
GPU (AGP 8X): Geforce 4 Ti 4200 64MB(I also have the Nvidia TNT2 it came with)
Storage: 64GB Compact Flash for easy file transfar.
SPU: Yamaha XG Waveforce YMF724 WF-192XG (I also have an SC-88 Pro on the way to use with GM)
For DOS games, I don't mind using DOSBox. I was already aware this CPU is too fast and noticed a scrolling issue with Warcraft 1. As long as I can pass GM from my sound card into DosBOX, I'd be perfectly content with it. This is something I hadn't looked into yet.
Ideally I don't want to dualboot, but since I use CF for my storage, maybe I'll buy another CF card for Win2000, but I'd mostly just want to stay on a single OS if I can.