Have your Windows 7 run some VM that passes your network card through to a virtualized Windows 98se/XP and then share through the guest OS in the VM? (after mapping a shared folder to your game images in the VM itself however, which will most likely show up as a network share)

I did some searching, and it looks like you might get somewhere by installing DSClient on your Windows 98 system. See
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/wi … itpronetworking
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555038

Just partition the drive into smaller segments and see if that works. I don't know if the 128GB limit is per-partition or for the entire drive. Worth a look-see.

It's much less about partitioning and more about accessing high LBA. No amount of small partitions will get around the potential data loss problem by using a huge hard drive with Win9x/2000

Depending on the parts you choose, those chipsets which are compatible with Intel Application Accelerator (IAA) support LBA48 with this tool installed. It is also possible to use an add-in card which comes with Windows 98 drivers for this very issue.

See Seagate's whitepaper on the subject:
http://seagate.com/support/kb/disc/tp/137gb.pdf

If all else fails, there is a patch:

http://msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable48bit … e-137gb-barrier

You could also run Linux with Samba as a file server OS. If you don't want a dedicated machine you could run it in a VM like leileilol suggested. Might have advantages compared to XP in a VM, resource usage should be lower.

Disc images in W98SE? Man I never thought of doing that! Would make my testing workflow with new hardware a lot faster 😀

Great Hierophant what do you use to archive your originals? Alcohol?

I've written to 2008R2 shares from NT4/95/98...

IIRC there are some changes that need to be done in gpedit\registry but I'm sure those are easily found on google.
Also remember the share/filesystem permissions. You'll likely need to use "anonymous" or "everyone" permissions.
It's been a long time since I did this since my fileserver at home is using FreeNAS so I don't have the need to share between old and new windows operating systems.

If you still can't get it to work then there's always CIFS on Linux.

I would recommend storing your files on a decent filesystem if you care about them. (zfs/btrfs).

I have 3 300 slot CD cases most which are double-pack but all were imaged long ago.

Most are cue/bin with clonecd for the copy protected ones and then Alcohol (for when Alcohol came out).

Of course even for the copy protected ones I always hunt down the crack since more often than not the copy protection will not work in a VM or with a newer OS.

DosFreak wrote:

Of course even for the copy protected ones I always hunt down the crack since more often than not the copy protection will not work in a VM or with a newer OS.

I'm doing it this way for the fullest retro gaming experience 😁

You could buy a cheap NAS system and put the disc images on it. Most NAS have no problem with earlier Windows.

Another option would be use another old system with Linux (or FreeNAS) to act as a NAS, but it will be noisier and use more energy. Even a Raspberry Pi with a USB drive could do the trick (although it will be very slow).

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Disc images in W98SE? Man I never thought of doing that! Would make my testing workflow with new hardware a lot faster 😀

You can even use Deamon Tools or Virtual Clone Drive on Win 95 (with versions that natively support USB), you will just need a usb motherboard capable (work fine on early USB for socket 7, just have to activate it in the bios, no need to use it), install some Win 95 usb upgrades called "usbstuff" and "usbsupp" (you have to install them following a simple procedure to prevent os corruption) and last install Internet Explorer 5.
That's quite perfect for a PMMX build, you can mount all your games from a network drive and it does not impact on performances or that's not really noticeable (if your NIC work like it should and is not too, or not at all cpu dependant it really speed things up).
Easy and fast way to install and play your games (using clonCD for disks imaging and cr*ck when copy protection is very troublesome) 😀
Using it for 5 years now, from socket 7 to socket A retro rigs (Win 95 to 98Se) and I will never go back 🤣