Offler

I do. this sounds promising

VLC 0.8.6 is the latest release with support for this operating system. Please note that these versions of Windows are not officially supported. No VideoLAN developer uses any of these systems, which makes them hard to support. VLC should mostly work with them, but some incompatibilities might appear. You might need to download The Microsoft Layer for Unicode on Windows 95/98/Me Systems. The two MSLU files need to be put in the C:\Windows\System\ folder. Warning: The following package is not up-to-date with the latest official version of the software. When using an out-of-date version, you may encounter important bugs or security holes. I am quite disappointed... I tried it some months ago. All i received was crash screen. FFDShow is in my system only for solving of compatibility issues. Surely it is not a good decompressor. I tried it with Progdvb for Mpeg2 decoding of digital TV. IT IS TERRIBLE. FFDShow is mainly a reason why i maintain special Mpeg2, Xvid and sound codec for quality purposes such as dvds... I got one old CRT monitor by IBM. Its image is crystal clear

Well i disagree with you. Also Mpeg2 decompression with cyberlink is very fast and i seems to be almost cpu independent when hardware acceleration is enabled. I prefer to use decoders which were used to encode the file. For better quality. FFDShow does the same, but i know that image quality might be worse than with proper codec. Also do VLC play digital tv? edit: it does.. will see... I had some trouble with it lately. (no win9x support at that time)

Codecs and Media tools: Media Player Classic: The one i can mostly reccomend. Has some internal filters, usable to play audio and video files, DVDs and can connect to Video Devices such as TV tuner, VIVO or Digital camera. Also can play videos using Overlay mixer, Video Mixing renderer 9 and Haali renderer. Shader effect... Windows Media player 9 Few months ago i was solving problem with WMV files - they were always choppy when using any player. The only way how to fix it was to install WMP9... Also this is only player able to play Digital Audio CD input through SPDIF which is connected directly from CD/DVD drive directly to SoundCard. The support of this feature is bit buggy but it is the best way how to play CDs. I dont recommend this software, but from my point of view it may cause trouble to work without it. ATV2000 (latest) Best software for Analog TV tuner viewing. Bit hard to control it but it has better image quality as many other software. Widely localized. Allows realtime capturing and encoding software and for some cards hardware MPEG. ProgDVB 4.85.3 Best software for Digital TV tuner. Look at previous post for details. Allows recording in MPEG2 Stream format. When you fix the codecs it is very usable without any bad errors. Power DVD 6 It is commonly bundled with DVD drives and graphic cards and in some cases with a legal CD-Key. Player itself is not interesting, but it contains a lot of usable codecs which are one of the best for Mpeg2 decoding. CLVSD.AX can decode mpeg using hardware acceleration which makec CPU load lower. Version 6 works correcly witn ProgDVB and MPC. AC3 Filter 1.63a (latest) The newest version of this sound decoder also contain very usable Equalizer which can really improve sound quality from DVDs, Digital television or other sound sources. This build is localized in many languages. Not so User friendly, but offers many possibilities in setting good sound quality. (ac3, dts, mpeg, pcm, ... and others) Note: When using AC3 filter with equalizer in MPC and 5.1 sound, if video is choppy set in MPC "Default sound device". I had some trouble when it was set to "Direct sound device:SoundBlaster LIVE". Correct setting for me was "Soundblaster LIVE" althougt it seemed same for many other videos it is not. Direct VobSub 2.23 Not the newest. Newer versions caused trouble with YUY2 colorspace while playing Xvid videos. I have to check if there are other versions. If you try to play video in VMR9 with subtitles YUY2 and YU12 formats are impossible to set, default colorspace is always RGB32. That setting is quite CPU consuming, but it may be connected with the video which was used to test. Newer versions were able to use YUV2, but the image was crippled and "Mod32 fix" didnt worked. Xvid - Koepis Build (Latest) Officially not supporting Win9x but it works great. Still under development. I recommend it for all Xvid and DivX videos. FFDShow Support for windows 9x was dropped. have to find last stable release for them. Usage: good for decompressing of formats you dont use commonly. H264 VFW Quite good h264 decoder, have to find its details Virtual DUB freeware. good working. i have to find some details about it. this page will be edited within day or two. i want to add here all links and re-test some things. I dont reccomend to use any of Codec packs available on web. Most of them are not correctly set. Beware of Nero - might screw up all codec settings.

the betatest i do is for freeware game project, not for company and it is based on .net and surely on Managed DirectX. If people from linux can create mono i am sure they can create wrapper compatible with managed directX but as a win tester i really dont care if there is any. and again, i dont like vista for poor driver support.

If you think that GUI of OS is only small part of OS than you are right. But i think that GUI is one of the most used part of system, unless you use cmd line as i like. MS want to build system on it as much as possible and they start to do it. I am sure that they use asm and classical versions of C to make "close to hardware" systems to work, but once they created whole GUI in .net they have done step which has changed many things. No core part of windows was programmed in .net before, and i am sure that explorer.exe IS based on this platform. Also i never believed that Mono is equal to .net. Beta version of software which I test is able to work on any windows with framework 2.0 and later and DirectX installed after .net, but never on linux. Maybe mono miss managed directx code - dont know exact reason. It is strange, because the developers of this sofware are trying to make it work under linux for some time. ad: "common developers dont have such good support as developers working directly in MS" I worked for a company which was developing PC game. They created whole new programming language for AI. I had source codes of that language, i had complete documentantion, i had its developer at hand. Every question was answered before i asked. He knew all about it. Which parameters work, and which does not, which may cause bugs and so on. now while i betatest a software i was reporting bug, and developer told me that it is possible to store a value regarding to directX, but it was impossible to load it again. he just dont know why, but he found different way how to archieve it. thats the difference what i was talking about. I know several tricks which can cause particular versions of explorer to crash, but i have to say that vista's one is the best. And the reason why it is so i see in such cooperation as in first case. to Noguru: i was talking about generic driver provided by microsoft in major, OEM driver provided by Asus, but you are right that ATI had bad drivers lately. but it was not only bad driver included...

For me .net doesnt mean any specificly good programming environment. Because it is windows only thats something what makes it isolated. But when i am in windows environment direct MS support of this environment may help improve development of all parts of OS - at all they have been writing their new OS in its own language. I know how can be support from developer who created programming language effective. But from another point of view there is hard to say if C# is good programming language at all, since common developers dont have such good support as developers working directly in MS. I mean - i dont care if .net really sucks, if they know how to use it. Clearly i think that other programming languages were too hard for them For me major reason why vista is not so popular is the way how it support (or doesnt support) hardware. Many generic and OEM drivers are buggy, while new drivers directly from the hardware manufacturer may work correctly, or may cause major performance downgrade (as with ATI driver, where different drivers cause difference 100 percent in shader performance) Fight between 32bit and 64bit environment is also something different. People with x64 are much more satisfied, just because support for this level is at least better.

Minor but nasty bug related with Ati graphic... I use Media Player classic to play DVDs. Also PowerDVD's Mpeg2 hardware accelerated codec CLVSD.AX which is used to decompress mpeg2 thought ATI GPU. Its the best way of MPEG2 decompression as long i know. When using RP9 and fullscreen it may corrupt image during image resizing. I have to test which feature of RP9 is causing this. Same error may occur in other apps... Any idea for now?

try ATV2000. It works great for me with Ati VIVO, so i think it should work with all in wonder tv tuner.

First of all, Managed code can be and is used in Windows 98SE daily. Install .net 2.0, then install DirectX 9.0 and check what has changed in the list of DX files in dxdiag. Of course - DX managed code will appear. Several benchmark test which i used to see if DX managed code does something or does not gived me results where my computer has aproximately 5-10 percent better 3D performance based on DirectX. Later i read some articles about .net and its possibilities and i was quite impressed. Right now i am betatesting a software which is being developed in C# and based on Dx managed code... I belive that .net is really good way how to create a program, althought i know it needs a bit more hardware. Later i got some minor issue with my hardware - it was the memory, and the betatested application returned an error. Later i discovered that memory modules were not connected correctly. Before the issue was fixed i have seen same memory error in vista regarding to Explorer.exe. If this core part of Vista is .net based it means that i am really sure that more of them are .net based.

So... The last question is about Graphics cards and the issue which caused XPs to allocate 4gigs as 3.2 gigs ram. How much memory any windows (32bit) need? 2 gigabytes can be assigned to a single applicaton. Win98 uses up to 100mb of ram, WinXP up to 512. Rest of 4gig pool is floating in the air or is it really used for something (especially the block which is invisible in XP)? Lately i tested vista, and its system management has finally becomed better as in XP, so i dont doubt that it can handle all memory. I am quite interested about high Hw limit of both XPs and 98Se (patched one) and the way how effectively both of them can use up system memory. Right now it seems to me that most of Windows upgrades were unnecessary while system had less than 4 gigabytes of memory, because no application was able to gain more than 2 gigabytes from system (and thus work faster). Also it is just question if 32bit application is able to acess so much memory, or cant. At all i am quite interested in system build on singlecore processor (AMD or Intel?) with approximately 3 or four gigabytes of memory to see how can applications perform in windows 98 and compare it with other windows based systems, with more memory available.

also there is another limit as i know... How much memory can assing system to a single application? In XP it is around 2gb... What about your patch?

if i should have 4gb of ram it will be possible to use it all without using harddisk, or what will happent if i have 4 gigs of ram and 2 gigs of swapfile...? just thinking about possibility to maximize OS potential in this particular case.

I just wondered how much memory can my old windows use. Since i have one superharddisk at hand it will be quite possible to use it without impairing system performance. So i just know that windows without PAE can use 4 gigs of physical memory. Lets imagine that i have rloews patch. How much memory can i use, or how big swapfile can i set? Previously i have set swapfile to 4 gigs and system was about to fall apart

to win95guy: Right now i still run Pentium III-S 1400 "Tualatin" CPU as my main computer. For some months i was optimizing my HW and OS to beat records in 3dmark 2001. Mostly i was trying to beat computers equipped with Intel Chipsets (since i use VIA chipset) stronger (and much more expensive) RDRams, and computers with stronger graphics. Last year i was sucessful and my computer is one of the most strongerst Pentium III machines in the world. One guy is better than me. He uses Apollo pro 266 chipset, DDR 266 rams, pair of PIII-S cpus and ATI HD 3850 AGP. Really beatiful machine IMHO. Later i bought Intel based board with 945 chipset and Pentium 4 on socket 775. I was quite stunned. CPU Performance which was measured was almost same, but the P4 got twice frequency ...

few months ago i unpacked msvcr2008 with any extracting program (twice, or three times). later with Kernel EX 0.3.6 i executed the setup and copied the extracted files to system32 directory. After tests with some applications for visual studio 2008 i considered this manually installed package as fully working on windows 98 SE with newest KernelEX. i just had no time to make tutorial for this

Lets begin with hardware configuration (as always): Board: Abit Vh6T mod "Immolator' Intel Pentium III-S 1400mhz 1,5 gigs of ram Ati X850XT w 256mb ram Adaptec 19160, Seagate Cheetah 15k, Intel Pro GT, Creative soundblaster LIVE 5.1. OS used: a) Windows 98SE, kernelex, SESP, and many other usable upgrades B) Windows Vista Home Basic (and business) 32-bit First of all i would like to say that after more than ten years it is first OS upgrade i did on my main machine, and for that i am thankful to people here, which made my Win98SE able to skip whole NT5 Windows family. Main differences: I have been stunned when i realized that whole Vista is programmed in .net C#. that makes vista bit more efficient than NT5 family windowses. Also i like the way when graphic card is responsible for all graphic effects on desktop (finally Graphic user interface is not handled by CPU). but at this point most of good news are gone. Drivers: Vista 32bit and Windows 98se are able both use same WDM drivers. only difference is that ati released wdm drivers only for windows 2000 and newer, and especially for vista there are DWM capable drivers. In Win98 i have full 5.1 surround with all possible sound effects and with ASIO function enabled. In vista i have churming stereo. The Creative's policy of vista drivers is just not acceptable for me, but at all this is not problem of OS. In TV tuner i found errors on PCI bus (errors in image). Later i discovered that it was caused by "CPU to AGP bridge" driver which has been provided as a generic driver by microsoft. i tried to solve this and i found very strange behaviour. But before that i found big issue in generic graphic driver - no OPENGL available. after upgrade by ATI drivers also i found extreme low performance of graphic card - surely caused by driver, which was also solved by newer versions of Catalyst 9.x. Later the ATI dropped the support of my graphic card completely, so i tried the 6.2 catalysts from year 2006. They worked seamlessly except missing DWM support (and thus aero was not available). later i found another connection. "CPU to AGP bridge" driver from year 2002 by Via works with Catalyst 6.2 perfectly. I get best performance, driver related errors were fixed, but 3d accelerated desktop became unavailable due missing DWM support. New AGP driver with new Catalyst can fix performance errors, but not driver related errors on PCI bus caused by AGP driver, but the AERO and 3d acceleration of desktop is available. Old AGP driver, and DWM enabled graphic driver are not compatible. At this point it is question if i want to have stable and functional system, with slow desktop, but realy good memory and cpu management, or system with hidden issues, bit lower performance but nice and beatiful 3d accelerated Aero. in my opinion... i hate disguise, and Vista Home basic (single cpu version, without aero) seems more suitable for my old computer. Also the most funny thing is that Vista 32bit is able to use same drivers as Win98SE which is 10 years old system, but Vista 64 bit is completely different cup of tea. 3d game performance: The Vista looks a bit faster than windows 98 for many reasons and in more than one games. the reason seems to be connected with the graphic card driver and also in more functional opengl support for some products. Also the cpu management (and app management) is really better when it comes to it. App support: Some programs from era when games were made both for DOS and WIN95 are not able to work with vista correctly, and dos programs are out completely. This makes vista only a bit worse that its predcessor. 64bit version should not be able to work with any 16bit apps (even with those which were created for win3.1 and win9x on 16bit), but this doesnt apply to my old 32 bit processor and windows. It will took another 5 years until 64 bit become more used for app creation in way when common user will be able to see the difference in performance and appearance of those applications. Potential: Vista offers potential for the old machines, but in many cases it is wasted by very bad driver support. At all only few applications were able to run better on vista. Right now it offers some features which are better like on XP, but i cannot use most of them, and nice design of desktop is not the main goal of any the system upgrade - for the same reason i didnt install XP i have to smash Vista. Too few things to offer, althought more than XP. Generally from my point of view i have to downgrade most drivers to 2000/XP versions, disable Vista themes to get Windows 2000 like system with a bit better core, but with extremely large disk footprint and at all slower desktop performance, lower backward app compatibiliy, better forward app compatibility, but faster app performance. the difference between 9X/2K/XP and Vista is that fewer drivers in vista works correcly, sound is impaired, and hardware support is worse, althougt Vista core is better. to remind Win98 vs XP article i just say, that XP core was not so good at it was described by MS, and all drivers worked for both systems in exception of graphic card, also application compatibility was also very close because of KernelEX. Even today only 10 percent of all apps are not able to run on win9x. Vista has indeed better core as win98 and XP, as first system in 10 years, and thats also the reason why i write such article. Requirements: They are not so high as it was believed. Big ram? NO. I have 1,5 gigs and 1 gig is still free. Disk? Partially yes, but do not forget to disable automatic defragmentation and to setup a pagefile with same maximum and minimum values. Thats also the thing that was never mentioned before and never applied before. I was wondering what it is doing all the time but i didnt realized that there is defrag running invisibly on the background. CPU? Absolutely NOT. Vista can supress background processes to minimum to speedup the main application. Graphic card? YES. here is the main point. But even onboard Intel graphics can run Vista Aero safely. At all Win98 has surely lower requirements. Impact: Well. Vista is not bestseller. Question is if Win7 will break this, but it is question. If the users will stick with WinXP 32bit to prefer backward compatibility of all apps instead of complete rebuild of all systems to 64bit Windowses the Win9x projects will still have potential to live on. Right now it seems that newer OS will be more reliable on newer hardware and it is not sure that this will apply during financial crisis. I am one of the few who believes that Vista is better than XP, but i really doubt that vista and 7 will spread massively as XP did few years ago. The transfer from 32 to 64 bits will be painful for many users... Conclusion: I believe that vista is a choice of secondary system when win98se with all updates cannot handle everything that is needed, but nothing less and nothing more. List of new features is quite interesting, but half of them are useless, and quarter has to be disabled. Vista has only few things to do in 32bit space.

Digital television: At all solved for my machine with great sucess, but with some things that will probably never be solved. What you will need: Digital TV tuner (DVB - T in my case) with driver compatible with Win98SE (for me Pinnacle 300i) Kernel EX ProgDVB Version 4.85.3 (located at http://www.progdvb.com/download_progdvb.html) Any MPEG-2 decoder (in my case it is PowerDVD Mpeg2 decoder able to use my ATI x850 card for video decompression) Features: Hardware accelerated Digital Tv viewing Bugs: Software is russian so it can produce some trouble for central european localizations. If the signal is lost the program can crash. using of VMR-9 is possible in windows 98 but its a bit buggy - image is not correctly alligned. Setbacks: it is hard to find Win98se compatible hardware. for example Pinnacle 310 which was released one year later has different one chip and may not be compatible with windows driver. i didnt found any support for radio software for this piece of hardware (its hybrid tuner, so it can tune in digi TV, analog TV and analog radio). a bit shame Windows 98 is no longer supported by the author of ProgDVB. Mpeg4 is not supported by that version.

I am testing Windows 98SE (+ RP9 + Kex 4 + IE6 + Opera 10 + MPCHC + a lot of software and my hardware) face to face with Windows Vista 32 bit on same machine. In few days i write a report about it and i hope i shall find a comparison of same with windows XP. right now i see that Vista is usable on my system only as a cross-plattform reference tool which helps me to find real and fake incompatibilities between several things - drivers, hardware, apps. At all i see some improvements in vista (especially the memory and CPU cache management, better sw compatibility as Win98SE+kex, really good sw environment) but i see a lot of disappointments in this system (it is very very large, sound does not work correctly, graphics are not working correctly, at all only few devices are working correctly).

well as said before i doubt that any representative of Ms will respond about unsupported software. Any response, technical tip, or additional software is indeed software support so they will not do it again. Any kind of external activation for any kind of non-cloudcomputing software is not a good choice, worst choice for OS in my opinion. at all the question is what can prevent situation when activation servers will not be available, and no patch which removes activation, or later no updates, no service packs. I just remember that no "closing" service pack was released to windows 9* in year 2006. to close up all the updates it is just good to keep the last service pack available for everybody in archivation server. For example i really like the work that abandonware servers do, and work of people like here. without help here it could be impossible to use win9x without any update no matter if official or unofficial.

Lightscribe: i have the same problem, but the DVDwriter works well at all. Delphi 2009: i noticed that Kex is attempting to run these applications. i have one here right now. it is working, but makes more than one several bugs. but at all good work.

Ok, i am trying to use newest 9.1 version. Minor bug: when i choose a theme and then i change a color of background after reboot the theme will be turned off unless saved with new setting. same problem as with Uberskin. Major bug: i tried to reinstall Kernel EX (from 0.3.2a to 0.3.6). during bootup a get error message so i had to use kexreco in msdos mode. it is possible that the dll files which are used by the RP9 are colliding with rp9 files. edit: version Kex 0.4.0 rc2 works fine. there seems to be an incompatibility with RP9 and KEX 0.3.6.

this one works for me http://sourceforge.net/projects/x264vfw/

of course i did I use Media Player Classic with those codecs and VMR9. i will post the link to the current H264 decoder i use if i found it again. i just have to be careful. usage of H264 decoder alongside with latest DivX is not a good choice. use Xvid instead.

the latest ffdshow that worked for me is ffdshow-rev2322_20081114 nonMMX nonSSE version. i dont know if the dropped the support completely or by accident, but i think i try some newer versions. by the way - the Koepis Xvid build still works, i found h264 decoder for all win, and also powerDVD clvsd.ax Mpeg2 decoder works for me.