rasteri wrote on 2022-02-26, 11:58:
Yeah I'm not massively interested in perfecting windows support, in my mind it's a DOS gaming machine that uses Windows 98 as a launcher.
Honestly, which makes it even better at running DOS games than DOS. Because editing your main autoexec.bat and config.sys to get a thing to work inevitable breaks something before that that did work. Plus, you just need a simple GUI to access the stuff anyways. Doesn't even need to be Windows, it's just super convenient on top of it.
Another thing I noticed, actually, was there is an option in the BIOS (edit: Yeah, it's the Protect/Unprotect option of the SST via SPITOOL.EXE, along with the read-only FDD boot modes) about disabling writing to the HD in use. I found this particular feature really interesting because it basically makes it so that the contents of the drive stay the same upon each bootup, meaning that while you cannot necessarily "save a game" you avoid, entirely, corruptions of the FAT32 file system due to sudden system reboots and such. It wasn't uncommon in the past to have to "start over" a computer from a fresh install of Windows 98 - I remember it being almost a defacto standard practice of the time. A lot of that of course eventually went away, largely in part to the journaled file systems of EXT3/NTFS, also just better software support/less buggy software overall, but the ability to "time freeze" a drive like that is not just something that industrial applications can use. This helps with overall system stability, in general.
rasteri wrote on 2022-02-26, 11:58:
A true Windows 98 gaming machine would need 3D acceleration and that's never gonna happen.
You know, there is a guy who reversed engineered the Voodoo 5 6000 ( https://www.tomshardware.com/news/3dfx-voodoo … etter-than-ever ), and I bet he would have a lot of intimate knowledge of the VSA-100 chips that were the last ones 3dfx came out with. I bet you you may just be able to get one of those put together, too. I agree that it would be a pipedream to attempt, but hey, the Orpheus sound card exists because somebody said "Challenge accepted."
I'm not saying you should but if you did, you would be a God among us mere mortals.