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Well, all of them can be theoretically played on Win98, but common issue is that computers compatible with Windows 98 have too weak CPU... I was thinking about some special AMD build with single core, but i dont know about available mainboard for that socket. The best way how to play them is to use hardware acceleration, but it is somehow limited too depending on codecs. Even when i was really hard working on system optimizations I still cannot play HD videos smoothly. The limit for FullHD video using WMV container was somewhere at 56 FPS while the video containted 70fps. The highest quality i was able to play was video with 720p at 30 FPS with matroska. On my system the device which is decoding Mpeg stream is graphic unit, the sound is being decoded by sound card again on hardware level. CPU handles only renderer, but it is not strong enough (Pentium III-s, 1400@1638). Pentium 4 does not perform much better.

Globally the Windows 98 had some issues with power management. I dont use power management for many reasons, but the bugs are part of the problem - the windows does not sleep or wake correctly with all devices. This may wary on used hardware - newer devices with WDM drivers may run more correctly, but only in case you are using Windows 98SE or Windows ME.

First page has been updated, some links will be added soon.

try to check on different computer if your Usb stick works. If yes problem can be in its software driver. Try other USB device. Something simple such as mouse. If the mouse works the problem could be in driver of your Usb stick... Sometimes the devices are being detected as "unknown device" and system stores this setting for them and it is quite complicated to force it to use correct driver.

I was setting some things in Windows lately when I have found some things about my sound. During bootup the sound always stuttered, but then it was OK. Later i set "Limit usage of DMA under 16mb" and sound is now clear. Card is Soundblaster Live 5.1 with WDM drivers. I have 1,5gb ram running on 1 gb with 512mb ramdisk and modified autoexec and config.sys. I just dont have any idea why this works for sound...

Since days of first internet pages there still have been some differences between multiple browsers. thats why acid tests were developed, but i still dont understand why the support for IE6 have to end. I dont like the browser anymore but still most people have quite quick and easy access to it (even if they use it as a download tool for opera or firefox or whatever). From times of IE5 i see a lot of progress in web creation (since i am stuck with very old version of HTML i can use ) but indeed the horror of incompatibility issues... If i imagine that the youtube will write a short message "sorry your browser is not supported"... Only the possibility of this makes me sick. Just imagine that the only supported browser for some pages will be IE and all others whill be unusable. The funny thing about it is that i was able to do so very simply many years ago. With one easy change in filename i was able to make web page displayable only by users of IE6, while other browsers get an error message, or tried to download the page. If somebody sets the standards he also have to sanction those who will use their browser or pages for such economic goals.

to Tripredacus: i know there is NT 3.x windows, but the poll answers are limited to 15 ... Shall I merge it with windows 3.1?

Choose OS which is the oldest on functional machine you own, even if you have older filesharing server, or you keep your old 486 alive because of some games.

I am trying to use SPDIF... just my possesion I know Irfanview. have to test it, but i just dont like its ugly red icon . I started with photos in my job using ACDSee and Photoshop 5.5. Now i have one old license key for 7.0 from copy which is no longer being used in my former job so i can use it legally, but when comes to Immolator project I dont know adequate freeware replacement for both. ACDSee was quite fast when i was using it some years ago, but now it contains tons of useless things. I just prefer to press enter in Totalcmd to view the image in fullscreen, properly aligned and to see it in time less than one second... Photoshop is bit bigger problem. I cannot find nothing so sophisticated. Also i found sound editing software called Audacity. Works great. It seems they plan to drop win9x support so i will contact them and ask a few questions. This freeware met all my requirements.

Current state: Hardware The strongest PC with Win98SE will use P4 or AMD 1650, but it will be quite hard to find usable system board. I dont know how new intel chipsets support this system and i have no reports. Intel chipset 945 is still being produced and installed on new systems, alongside with Pentium4 and older graphics can be used for "new" machine on windows 9x. Alternate disk adapter will be mandatory, since most new boards have SATA. For me the SCSI is still the most compatible way how to boot on any board with any OS. The most advanced system based on Windows 9x should look like this: (please note that i am not familiar with AMD and its chipsets) Pentium 4 3ghz 4 gigabytes of DDR2 (rloews patch mandatory) Intel Chipset 945 or older, better with AGP Ati X850 or older, Nvidia 6xx0, maybe 7xx0 or older This performance should be enough for programs or games from year 2007 or 2008, but the compatibility even with KernelEx might be questionable. Also i am not sure when may occur errors caused by too high cpu frequency, or how can win9x handle PCI-E. So much for Hardware, lets search for software To these days i was able to find and use all tools i needed to my work and hobbies, some of them work because projects available at this page. Most crucial for me as common user was the compatibility with formats i want to use and work with. Lets mention some software which has been sucessfully tested and later used here: Opera 10 - I know it had issues on some machines, but it is good to have new browser Media Player Classic - Contains internal decoders, but works great with all external codecs. Supports DX9 renderer and shaders. DVD player Open office - currently using version 2.3 ATV2000/ProgDVB - TV viewing. They are not flawless but they dont make much trouble. Most SW available is only worse. BurnIMG - tool for dvd burning. slim with 2,5 mb. It just cannot burn CD audio from waves... Virtual dub - easy to use video editing tool Total Commander - the one and only Miranda 0.8.8 - Has its bugs, but works for me in win9x Missing software: - some freeware sound editor - freeware image editor - Audio CD player Sw able to use SPDIF Features which will be out of system possibilities: - playing some HD video formats So if you have an older machine which is not intended only for playing but also for multimedia win9x should be enough for it. Still a PC on which you can browse web, record sound and work with or just entertain. Immolator can be used as machine with lots of multimedia, it is able to process most documents, audio and video formats. Issues caused by lower system peformance than the average are not problem of Win9x. Hardware compatibility is now the biggest trouble which makes impossible to make more hardware upgrades. All machines with windows 9x and some hardware performance can be used this way without limitations. System Stability: Nothing to report. No system crash occured for few months.

Im reading the article about Win98 architecture which dencorso posted here. Very interesting. Im interested mostly in Virtual memory management. There are certain limits. 640kb for real-mode deviced, 4mb to 2gb Win32 apps, 2-3 gb core system components, 3-4gb Ring 0 components. Are there any information how much memory can core and ring 0 components use up? To me it seems that for each win32 system (From win95 to XP and Vista 32bit) should be best to have 4 gigabytes of ram to assure that disk shall NOT be accesed and to keep all system parts "aboard" in memory, without affecting memory reserved for 32bit applications. The fight between Singlecore and Dualcore CPUs is a bit different battlefield, but ideal Win32 machine to me is using Dualcore processor, with 4 gigabytes of ram and Windows 5.x, no matter that system shows only 3.2gb. Or will be memory in this case bit wasted? The goal is to use disk only as a peripheral device which is not intended to use as random access memory (swap). To solve thes it is good to know how intensly can windows use up the memory which it reserves.

Good point at BD... Anybody tried Blu-Ray on win98? edit: Miranda Its win9x builds contains some bugs, so i tried Pidgin based on GTK+. Since KernelEX supports GTK+ i expected no errors but after running of it i get error: error loading pidgin.dll Error: 31 a device attached to the system is not functioning. seems like wrong path???

Next Step: DVD/CD burning software Nero is complete failure from all point of view. Since then i decided to choose more simple software. I found Imgburn so i think it will be quite useful. Before i choose this software i just want ask about your suggestion. Also there is a limit because of FAT32 file system for 4gb files so because of this i am looking for software which will be able to burn even 8gb double layered DVDs, but mostly without creating an image, just with copying files somewhere.

Mostly the working ASIO efects from surround mixer, but while i tested VXD and WDM drivers for several different devices i noticed that system is more stable with WDM drivers. Also WDM drivers are the biggest reason why i was considering upgrade to Windows 2000 and later a reason why i tested Win Vista. At all Win2k still stands as a giant, unaffected by visual bluffs of XP, but with solid system core, which does not suffer of low developer support. But it still does not support some things which Win9x do

Well it also depends what you mean by workstation. It is possible to install Windows 98 on computer with Xeon processor if you find such machine. I also run a computer wich server components and it has quite good performance for an old Tullie. If you are trying to run single computer with multiple console sessions i really dont know if this is possible on Windows 9x... The most weird thing i was able to create with it was to setup a dialup connection to my computer via mobile phone and also acess the internet connection to the caller. I just wonder if this was ever practically used, for example with ISDN...

well, the cheat i used was probably usage of Audigy card during installation, and later the replacement with sblive, while system didnt noticed hw change, but i dont remember how exactly i tricked the system into this state.

Try to find complete hardware specifications of your notebook. read the list of all hardware devices, and read devices in your device manager. You will find a difference and that shall be your unknown device. Also try "unknown device identifier" software, but it may not be 100% true.

I got one original Creative driver CD. This one was for Audigy 1. i will check it later and edit this post.

Approximately year ago i sucessfully installed WDM driver for this soundcard, alongside with dos emulation and Surround Mixer. Features: Full 5.1 support Surround Mixer and its sound effects ASIO EAX 2.0 (sblive 5.1) If i remove the soundcard from the computer it will not boot, and will freeze with unreadable BSOD. The trouble with is that i cannot reproduce installation of this driver again on fresh system installation. The driver package contains more than one driver and it is quite hard to choose among them. Some are "emulation drivers" which are intended for cheap sounblaster cards which were sold onboard... I have chosen WDM driver rather than VXD, since win98SE does support they worked far better than VXD at least for me. As long i remember the installation of the driver passed sucessfully, but it worked correctly only if there was previous VXD driver to replace, and it was necessary to have dos driver working (and that installation was manual vice-versa). Have somebody here working WDM driver in Win98SE or ME?

for some time i was analyzing some games. First of all get a Kernel Ex and use it. You have to know which game uses which engine. For example games like Quake 4 or Prey are all based on Doom 3 engine. One of them is fixed, others are most probably fixed too. Dependency walker... Last time i unpacked msvcr2009 to analyze its dlls and after fixing all exports to kernel users of win9x can use it and all software based upon it. Now i have no time to focus on dll dependencies but i know that it is good way to look onto programming languages which lately dropped support for windows 9x and analyze all their dependencies. For example Delphi. Once fixed we get full compatibility with all software based on these "unsupported" apps. if you can use C++ you can do almost everything. maybe creating of compatibility layers in windows will be something for you.

The Czech portal www.sosej.cz offers the download of Revolutions pack 9. it was downloaded more than 2000 times in czech and slovak region (around 16 milion citizens in both countries). http://www.sosej.cz/Windows-98-Revolutions-Pack.html here is the link. This may encourage you to continue in your work . Also i noticed that on many portals are old versions of Revolutions pack. I found even version Four. maybe it will be useful to inform about newer versions.

well, i havent explorer.exe dissasembled, but if it gives same error as .net based application? Actually after stopping Longhorn project i never heard that new build will have different philosophy when it comes to explorer... my criterions are hardware compatibility, driver quality and way how core of system handle system resources.

i reinstalled the RP9 and the bug vanished... strange. At all ignore my last bugreport

I use opera 10 in windows 98SE since beta2. works fine for me. no trouble at all.

so... The VLC works. Only bug ocurred when i opened DVD - VLC crashed. This player do the same trick as FFDShow. Compatibility from every point of view. Surely it has small CPU overhead. I was quite disappointed at some things. It does not detect my audio card correctly as 5.1, and the settings doesnt seem work correctly - rear speakers are mute... No deincerlacing for DVDs is just terrible There is also support for Analog video devices, but it is more usable for cameras. Tv tuners seems to be hardly tuned Digital video source (DVB-T) is mentioned here, but the tuning interface is quite complicated. I was unable to set it correctly for now. At all i can recommend it for people who dont want to play around with tons of codecs , from another point of view a cannot recommend it for people who search supreme sound and video quality. VLC offers more quality than average, but not the best quality.