First post, by AaronS
I put together an AM3+ (ASUS M5A97 R2.0 MB) with the intention of dual booting between 98/XP/Vista. Up to now I've only been messing with 98 and it runs solid on this board with a Quadro FX600 PCI + Audigy 2 ZS. There are two issues (not affecting performance really but wanted to see if anyone here had an idea).
The first is to do with ACPI which is probably normal for such a late board using ACPI 2.0a I believe this has. I had to setup windows 98se with the "/p i" flag otherwise lots of Device Manager errors. The only thing in my bios mentioning ACPI is "C1E" which I disabled. But of course every time I shut down the system I have to press the power button to turn it off. I've read about people wanting to force this message and using regedit to add ACPIOption = 2 (I tried this but adding 1, which made the system worse and unable to shut down at all, it would reboot, which is common with non functioning ACPI. I also tried the Win98 Quick Install "fully patched with DirectX 8.1" option and, that actually shuts down fine, so eitherits using a patch that is able to bypass this and shut down normally or some tweak I'm not aware of.
The other thing is in Device Manager I have a "PCI System Management Bus" yellow exclamation, to be honest I expected way more than just this one thing, a quick google search brings up this forum post:
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/what-is- … ent-bus.561714/
In which user "Medic" talks about a PCI patch "pci16W.zip", unfortunately the link is dead but they also mention Via, which my board doesn't use, but not sure if its a generic patch that might fix this yellow exclamation. Afaik this isn't negatively affecting anything so I don't care too much but it would be nice to see a "clean" device manager.
Only the FX600 and Audigy 2 are currently connected to the board with most other stuff disabled in the bios (serial, audio, usb3) for the moment I'm using legacy USB but will buy a PS/2 mouse and keyboard soon because "Restart to MS DOS" doesn't allow the use of keyboard anymore, something to do with Windows handing back the legacy USB to the bios I guess.