Greywolf1 wrote on 2024-12-07, 07:51:

I keep seeing videos of win98 on modern machines and was wondering how well games work around that period.

That depends on which graphics driver is installed. The default VGA driver won't cut it; VBEMP provides higher resolutions and bit depths, but still doesn't perform well enough for games. MattKC ran into some major issues with the latest Nvidia driver for Windows 9x.

I have a laptop that had win7 on with a core 2 i5 chip in it and sort of have xp running on it now but not perfectly. Do I try t […]
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I have a laptop that had win7 on with a core 2 i5 chip in it and sort of have xp running on it now but not perfectly.
Do I try to create nearly original machine with the P4 I have or
Emulation or is an old 2010 win7 laptop usable.
Due to circumstances laptop it easiest to use to play frequently and all my laptops are too old to emulate win98 smoothly.

I doubt a 2010 laptop will have Windows 98 drivers. While PCem works, it's demanding as you said - the laptops I've used go up to a Pentium 75 before they start to slow down. 86Box is even slower.
The P4 system seems to be your best bet, unless you happen to have something older.

I have nowhere to setup my desktop so I can come and go to tinker on it until it’s fully functional and I’m loathe to spend £1500 on a new laptop only to play games more than 25years old that’s why I was hoping there might have been some alternate solutions.

Compaq and I think HP and Dell, supported Win98 a few years into the noughts for their corporate business. Meaning you can find P4 class laptops with official Win98 support and graphics such as Radeon 7500. These are typically not the consumer lines, but some of the consumer machines might be close enough in specs they can use the same drivers. These should be good enough for "win 98 exclusive" gaming, on their native res, and games that work on XP should also work on much faster Vista and W7 era machines.

But if you've already got a p4 machine, that has a good chance of being able to do Win98 native with gaming at period resolutions.

Got dell dimension 3000, 3100c and motherboard for 5000
Need somewhere I can tinker the first 2 are for 98 option and possible dual boot xp and the 5000 motherboard has the pci-e x16 slot.
The 3100c has a pci-e x1 slot so I have my work cut out for me I’ve had many crashes getting 98 setup on the first two.

Also a lot of those laptops are expensive as parts tend to be broken or no power supply finding a good one is like a lottery

What model laptop is it, although I agree chances of it running Win98 are very slim.
Rather then trying to install Win98, maybe you can find patches to get your games running in WinXP?

The 3000 looks to have a Intel 865 chipset, Good choice for Win98 build

The 3100c looks to have a Intel 915 chipset, which most people seem to struggle installing Win98 on.

I'd go with the 3000

The laptop is a dell inspiron 15r m5010 I’ve doubled the mem to 8gb win7 64bit.
The other is a ACER aspire timeline can’t remember model but I’ve got xp on that but it has driver issues originally vista.
I’m aiming for a dual boot win98/xp to cover my gaming era. dos/win95 can be covered with dosbox and emulation quite well.

For laptops first thing your going to want to check is if the onboard audio and graphics card have any support for Win98.
If not then not much point struggling to try and force the OS to install.