Which drivers should I use for a Leadtek Winfast A250 Geforce Ti4200 128MB?

Personally I would go with Detonator 4x.xx in combination with DirectX 8.1

I'm currently running DX9 as it's part of the Audigy install guide.

I'll check out the Detonator drivers. 43.45 seems to be the king of the hill, I'll download those. The card hopefully arrives in about a week.

Dx9 could cause issues with some early D3D games with this card, but perhaps those can be tackled with the Voodoo 2's.

Meanwhile I've got CD ROM running in DOS. I'm improving the config.sys etc in preparation for the final (...) reinstall.

Speaking of, can I leave all my hardware connected (Voodoo SLI pair, drives...) when doing the Windows reinstall or better not?

While waiting for the Geforce to arrive I'm informing myself on the possibilities of this PC...my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X REV 1.2) supports up to 866mhz according to the manual.

I'm wondering if it would support a P3 coppermine 1000MHz in practice? The mobo has the right multiplier to arrive (mathematically) at 1000 with 133FSB.

Upgrading the 733 to 866 might not really be worth it, but 1000 is quite a bit more. I have some W98 games that would like a 1000...

Bu t before doung such cpu adventures I might be better off replacing the psu first. 235W might be a bit low for the Geforce 4 ti 4200.

And that's how i ended up with this for my w98 system:

You start with something which seems totally sufficient based on when it was made and everything, but then it turns out it is not really enough to run everything the way you want. Perhaps because today we are used to at least 60FPS, but back then 20-30FPS were normal and actually good.

Looking at gigabyte site for your board - it seems to officially support 1Ghz coppermine and 1.1Ghz "P3-celeron": https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-6VX7- … ort#support-cpu

Also you should not have to disconnect anything when reinstalling windows. The only exception to this is extra storage to avoid it installing bootloader in weird places, but i am not sure this issue even applies to 98. It is likely XP and up only.

I'll be shopping for a 1000MHz after I have upgraded the PSU. 😀

In case you want to go all the way:

But these are very hard to find.

And didn't gigabyte indicate that these are not supported by the bios?

I can have a 1000 for 20 at home, so I'll take that

The list at the Gigabyte site that is mentioned above is far from complete. If the board supports 1GHz/133 Coppermine it will support 1.13GHz/133 Coppermine too. But if cost is important then 20 is of course the way to go.

Yeah, apart from the voodoo2 SLI I try to keep it at the cost(&compatibility&effort)/benefit sweetspot. So a Ti4200 instead of a Ti4800, a P3 1000 instead of a 1133, 512MB RAM instead of 1.5GB...it will be a very potent W98 machine but not an exotic.

Also I'll see if the Voodoo's don't run too hot with P3 1000 already. With 733 they're lovely cold.

These rarer high end cpu's may not seem a good deal from the perspective of benefit but they are certainly not going to lose their monetary value. The same goes for Geforce 4 ti 4600/48oo but these are underpowered in combination with Coppermine anyway.

On the other hand, a 15€+shipping CPU is allowed to lose value as far as that is still possible. 😀

The goal of this PC was to play the games I used to play as a kid. That was a 200MMX. We played some games at horrid framerates, and I think I have a mistaken memory about some other games; we must have played these on a more recent PC. Either way, I'm now building a system that can play those games at a very good framerate. The art is to draw the line somewhere. I've bought some late W98 games this weekend that will define that line. Games that ask for 1GHz in the specs on the back, things like that.

Once I'm satisfied with this PC, I'll look into my XP machine. I have totally forgotten what spec it is. P4, Audigy, some Sapphire GPU, and I think it could play HL2 nicely. That PC can take over where this W98 PC stops. I doubt there would be any games that need more than my Win98 PC yet won't run on XP (or W11 😀).

It looks like a nice machine anyway and that is what matters.

Meanwhile I have found a Ti4200 (on its way), a P3 1000 (nearly on its way) and a heftier PSU (I'll pick it up in a few days). This also means that, minus a case, I have literally an entire second Pentium 3 PC in parts and then some. But I need that motherboard for another application so I can't build it into a PC. Nor do I need to.

So that still gives me a bit of time to try out some configuration stuff, such as giving the CD drives in DOS different relevant names. All prep for the "final" fresh install, where I hope to hit a hole in one. With the 3 partitions, things should go smooth as I have all drivers waiting on the D partition.

I'll also try out a better install of Bink Video, as currently it's playing in 4 quarters in some games. Arty, but wrong. I had had forgotten how many games of the era used Bink.

When I do the reinstall of W98, how should I deal with Windows automatically installing drivers regarding my preferred order of installation? Actively cancel those that ask, and don't worry about those that run automatically?

Meanwhile I'm trying to give both the Plextor and LG CD drives a meaningful name in DOS using SHSUCDX. I can get both drives detected no problem when I only give the device name "Plextor", but in that case both drives are listed as "Plextor". Whatever else I try fails.

Autoexec and Dosstart have this line:

LH C:\CDROM\SHSUCDX /D:PLEXTOR /D:LG

Config.sys has these lines:
DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDROM\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:PLEXTOR
DEVICEHIGH=C:\CDROM\VIDE-CDD.SYS /D:LG

I get the following error:
Can't open CD driver LG. SHSUCDX can't install.

When I change autoexec/dosstart to "LH C:\CDROM\SHSUCDX /D:PLEXTOR" it works fine but both drives get called Plextor.

Any idea?

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2025-06-10, 07:41:

When I do the reinstall of W98, how should I deal with Windows automatically installing drivers regarding my preferred order of installation? Actively cancel those that ask, and don't worry about those that run automatically?

I do not think windows drivers will cause any issues. It is more of a matter of having certain manufacturer drivers installed before other ones. Or in another words - chipset drivers before anything else.

Though i may totally be wrong. On my system, having to use USB kb/m to install windows, i had to mess around quite a bit to make it work and installed things like USB drivers before anything else. It still worked fine.

Nicolas 2000 wrote on 2025-06-10, 07:41:

When I do the reinstall of W98, how should I deal with Windows automatically installing drivers regarding my preferred order of installation? Actively cancel those that ask, and don't worry about those that run automatically?

For the GPU and Soundcard I'll hit cancel and run the setup program when I'm ready.
For more simple things like Voodoo and Network cards I'll extract the drivers and point windows to that folder when asked.
Doesn't really matter though, anything you hit cancel on you can kick off again from Device Manager.

Re the CD naming issue I remember similar issue with MSCDEX, maybe the name is too short or certain reserved characters?
I ended up with something like CD-ROM and CD-RW

I've tried other names, safe names...didn't work.

After sparring a bit with chatgpt, it seems like some drivers don't like being launched twice and others autodetect all drivers/ don't support the "unit" argument. In those cases, it suggested me to admit defeat.

So I've gone for the name "optical" for all drives. 😀