halohalo

ULi doesn't complete the driver for southbridge M1573, so there is no driver for M5287 SATA controller under Win98SE. You can just install the WinXP(i386) M5287 driver manually from ULi Integrated 220, and the yellow question mark should disappear. (Anyway, M5287 SATA controller will not work ) PATA controller should be supported by Win98SE and identified as "ALi M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE controller". But I am not sure if there is any problem with DVD burner and the board. Latest Realtek AC'97 driver may not support ALC880. Because ALC880 is HD Audio Codec. You can try old CNQ_1_0_8_1.EXE for CNQ support.

Since December 2006, DirectX no longer supports Windows 98/98se/ME, so D3DX9_32.DLL will not install on these operating systems. But it is still possible to install latest DirectX(December 2006) without D3DX9_32.DLL. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

On some boards(ex: GA-K8A480M-9) , there is no PATA compatible mode for SATA controller in BIOS. So ESDI_506.PDR does not work on SATA HDD, and you can't see SATA HDD in device manager. Besides, SATA HDD will be forced to work at MS-DOS compatibility mode.

I only have X850XT PCI-E and X800pro AGP(R420), so my experience may not work for you. When I installed CATALYST 6.2 for X850XT PCI-E on GA-K8A480M-9(ATI RS480 + Uli M1573), manually update resulted in an installation failure after reboot, just like what you encountered. I tried to install the driver by running Setup.exe in subfolder "6-2_wme_dd_cp_30314\Driver", and I failed again. Finally I let CATALYST 6.2 handle the installation and completed without any problem. I need to install CATALYST 6.2 first before downgrading driver. If I install CATALYST 5 directly, an error message appears when entering Win98se normal mode, and Win98se stops working. I also use X800pro AGP(R420), but it works well with CATALYST 4.11~6.2. Compared with X800pro AGP(R420), the installation of X850XT PCI-E is troublesome Besides, ATI supports R481 since CATALYST 6.2, and R480 since CATALYST 5.2. That means X850XT AGP may have more unknown compatibility problems than PCI-E ones.

Uli USB 2.0 driver works on GA-K8U-939(M1689 chipset). Since NVIDIA acquires Uli, I guess they will never fix the USB 2.0 problem for Win9x/me

Original Audigy 2 has both VXD and WDM driver for Win9x/me. You can find the driver from its' driver cd, not from CREATIVE official site. According to the statement from CREATIVE, even Audigy 2 ZS supports Win9x/me, but I don't know if there is any VXD driver for Audigy 2 ZS, since VXD driver is stable than WDM driver. However, not all products of Audigy series support Win9x/me. For example, Audigy4, Audigy 2 ZS notebook and Audigy Value(Audigy SE) do not support Win9x/me. I guess new X-Fi series should not be able to support Win9x/me. Anyway, it is necessary to check the package first for the statement about Win9x/me support.

Both AGP and PCI-E cards are supported. I built a new pc with Opteron 154. X850XT, Audigy2, and GA-K8A480M-9(ATI RS480 + Uli M1573), it is surprising that X850XT works without major problem. X800pro AGP works with older CATALYST, but it is necessary to install CATALYST 6.2 for X850XT PCI-E before downgrading driver. However, Uli M1573 does not support SATA, because Uli didn't complete win98/me driver for M1573 (M5287 SATA Controller). Besides, all USB devices(floppy, flash disk) disappear after installing Uli USB 2.0 driver. Switching to Orangeware driver and USB 2.0 devices disappear, so finally I gave up