xrayer

My current mobo running Win98SE (and DOS, XP, Debian, ...) Asus P5LD2 -support for Core2 CPU (newer revisions), I use E6400@2,4GHz -PCI-E/PCI -intel 945 + ICH7R -additional onboard IDE ITE8211 = up to 6 PATA devices! (fully utilized by 3 optical drives, 2 HDDs, 1 ZIP 100MB) -4 DIMM slots (I use 2x512MB DDRII 667MHz in dualchannel) I managed to install Win98SE without serious problems. I installed official drivers for ITE8211 IDE, Marvell Yukon LAN, modified drivers for nVidia 7600GS PCIE, unofficial USB2.0 drivers included in nUSB 3.0 & 3.2, modified intel INF files. In device manager left only one unknown device called "motherboard resources" but it's OK. I didn't tested SATA yet (currently have all on PATA) and I don't use onboard sound because of better SB Live! Remaining issues: -SB emulation driver doesn't work under DOS and Win98 (only possibility for dos games is some kind of emulation - DOSBOX, VDMSound (XP), DOSEMU (Linux)) -Windows 98 hangs during shutdows process (bad combination with nvidia) and I have to use restart and shutdown manually -This crap boasts with overclocking features but it have very bad behavior when FSB exceed about 320MHz, then on all restarts the system is going power off and on within 2 seconds which I belive doesn't prolong life of HDDs. But I fixed this issue by HW-modding - I inserted an asymmetric delay circuit in PSON ATX supply signal to avoid shutdowns when signal goes high shorter than 2 sec.

And what VGA chip you had? FW 77.78 supports up to 6800 + 7800 but not 7300/7600. Before I had 6600GT this drivers works. BTW the missing call in nv4_mini.sys from 2k/xp driver was ZwPowerInformation (NTOSKRNL.EXE). It couldn't be really needed, maybe it could be patched to not use this func and then may work...

BTW Are there some unofficial drivers for modern nVidia cards for NT4.0 SP6 like for Win9x? With latest official forceware 77.78 my GF7600 boots in VGA mode only. I tried to force install winxp drivers 94.xx but it failed to boot due to missing function kernel call, so drivers really are not compatible. The last I tried was installing universal VESA VBE 3.0 driver which works in higher resolution and true colors but it's very slow and due to crippled nvidia VBE 3.0 implementation it cannot setup higher refresh rate than 60Hz which is a big issue on CRT...

BTW Are there some unofficial drivers for modern nVidia cards for NT4.0 SP6 like for Win9x? With latest official forceware 77.78 my GF7600 boots in VGA mode only. I tried to force install winxp drivers 94.xx but it failed to boot due to missing function kernel call, so drivers really are not compatible. The last I tried wa installing universal VESA VBE 3.0 driver which works in higher resolution and true colors but it's very slow and due to crippled vnidia VBE 3.0 implementation it cannot setup higher refresh rate than 60Hz which is a big issue on CRT...

>From there, you can issue GRUB's "halt" command. This doesn't shut down per se, but it does halt the machine and then the front panel power button >turns it off gracefully. Aha, but you need to press power button still manually. So why to wait for booting grub? Just press power after computer restarts. I need fully automatical shutdown when I'm sleeping or I'm away. >If I wanted to go one step further, I could have GRUB boot the Linux distro to its login manager. There is a real Shutdown command there that truly turns >off the machine, but I don't have the patience to wait another 30s or so for Linux to boot just so I can shut down. GRUB's halt does just fine! You don't need to boot linux, you can shutdown by small tools from dos. DOS itself boot up in one second But the reason why I'm still not satisfied is that when it reboots it beeps during POST and optical drives make some noise. I woul like to reach silent shutdown - need to be done just after reboot.

I still use old good & small 2.95 - the latest of 2.xx line I could find.

BTW Are there some unofficial drivers for modern nVidia cards for NT4.0 SP6 like for Win9x? With latest official forceware 77.78 my GF7600 boots in VGA mode only. I tried to force install winxp drivers 94.xx but it failed to boot due to missing function kernel call, so drivers really are not compatible. The last I tried was installing universal VESA VBE 3.0 driver which works in higher resolution and true colors but it's very slow and due to crippled nvidia VBE 3.0 implementation it cannot setup higher refresh rate than 60Hz which is a big issue on CRT...

Yes, I had similar idea doing it via condition in autoexec.bat (if you have me then you don't have autoexec). How you are doing the shutdown via GRUB? Does it have this option inside or you run DOS and shutdown program? But the best thing would be do shutdown _just_ befre windows exec instruction causing reset... I try to do it but i don't have detail win arch knowledges about shutdown/reboot process.

Thx, I already browsed Commell's site and found Spectra distributor. Do they sell to other countries? Hm, it may significantly increase price by postage and duty . Maybe I should make a trip to DE/AU I upgraded before 11 months and there simply was not any C2D+ISA capable board. Now I can see there's even some newer with 965 but this sucks because missing native IDE. No, I can clearly see "P4LA - Intel® CoreTM 2 Duo Desktop industrial ATX Motherboard"

It's unofficial INF set by Peter made of latest 915 for 9x and newer for XP. Currently I don't use any SATA drives so I can't check if it works in native mode. I use PATA drives attached to additional ITE8211 ATA133 onboard controller. But you can try it. See our unofficial 98se site: http://windows98.ic.cz it's intelinf.zip file

For me the most important thing on 9x is good compatability with older, especially DOS SW which needs some level of HW access - there NT gives no chance. Compared to pure DOS it gives me nice light GUI with multitasking ability allows to run DOS sessions, 16 and 32bit win apps with support of most newer HW. On my current PC 98se runs pretty fast and small sized (without any garbage I wouldn't never use). When I'm doing something with system I usually backup entire windows directory in few tens of secons (under other OS) so I can return back quickly. Try this on 8GB Vista, hehe. But big issue is fading (nearly dead) HW support which will make impossible to run this OS on most current/future HW R.I.P.

Hey dude, this board is so exciting new for me! I have been watching ISA mobos for latest years http://www.volny.cz/rayer/hardware/mbisa.htm but when I need to upgrade I couldn't find any MB supporting Core2 duo and ISA together (there was some 945 board but w/o C2D support). So I gave it up and bought common cheap Asus MB P5LD2 without ISA but with additional PATA133 controller. Your mobo looks nice. But issue for me is that buying such mobo in CZ country is nearly impossible, there probably isn't any distributor I know only about distributor of Advantech mobos and they are priced 4-times than others for general PC.

Hm, strange I don't have much accidents with bad rendering of nvidia drivers/cards. Once I remember on GF4MX440 it made strange effect when square checkboxes in windows was rotated about 10 degrees CCW, see this: http://www.volny.cz/rayer/windows/winbug.gif but it was very rare (this fixed after reboot).

I know about this 2 MS patches and allready tried it. Anyway it could be included in unofficial servicepack. I think this mentioned thing may cause the problem: "The computer could hang with a black screen because of the method in which IRQ holders for the video adapter are configured at boot time and disabled during shutdown by the Pci.vxd component." I think I have updated pci.vxd but I'll check again at home... EDIT: I checked the system files but all I have same or newer version (from nSP).

Yes Im'm sure. At first you find win.com /z feature yourself so APM shutdown code is really there. Even I saw somewhere patched win.com version which didn't shutdown PC. I was trying this: boot up my wins an replace win.com with simple prog which light keyboard LEDs and then I do 1) shutdown - It light up 2) reboot to dos - It light up 3) reboot - It didn't light up Somewhrere I readed that on shutdown windows are trying to switch back to realmode and needs to successfully terminate all PM drivers. This is a place where it stucks. When doing just reboot it's not necessary, reboot is done from PM. I would need some logger which saves as much possible events happening on reboot.

I can't. I need latest drivers to work with my GF7600 now.

I searched for some universal VESA driver (like XP have) to use higher resolution on my portable 98se bootcd but nothing found. BTW there's universal VESA driver for Windows 3.x I wonder nobody made it for Win9x.

I can report that 7600GS PCI-E works for me - I bought passive cooled card by Asus. I use setup.exe to install drivers and they find the card properly. After reboot it jumped to higher resolution and colors. I reuploaded the cuurent version I installed on site linked above. The only one thing that doesn't work is refresh rate override - there's only "default" option and no choices for other freq. It worked with 6600GT. Anyway the refresh rates leaved set from previous install so I still have nice 85Hz. Is there some program or reqistry tweak to change it? Here's a short comparison of all 3 VGAs on same system (I know UT2k3 is quite old and don't use new feats present on 7xxx) UT2003 - 6600GT botmatch-anubis.bat 6.414104 / 131.647461 / 235.257553 fps -- Score = 131.729263 500 GLQuake 192.5 FPS @500/500 UT2003 - 7300GT 22.087105 / 109.879433 / 247.155441 fps -- Score = 109.918694 350 25.551746 / 122.817650 / 239.012955 fps -- Score = 122.880478 400 34.479042 / 131.312286 / 235.985138 fps -- Score = 131.388199 450 GLQuake 178.3 FPS @350/350 GLQuake 208.0 FPS @400/400 UT2003 - 7600GS 27.910692 / 136.744904 / 241.676956 fps -- Score = 136.839706 400 39.587563 / 142.116074 / 236.930481 fps -- Score = 142.222290 450 23.092884 / 142.187195 / 239.293396 fps -- Score = 142.273376 500 GLQuake 201.8 FPS @400/400 GLQuake 228.2 FPS @450/450 GLQuake 243.9 FPS @500/470

Try here: http://windows98.ic.cz in VGA section. I'll probably buy 7600GS too because this 7300 have slightly less performance than my 6600GT.

Yeah, now I'm running on GF7300GT PCI-E - modified drivers 82.69 works fine. I use ZakMcKracken's version beacuse MGDX has some corrupted setup (it displayed dialog windows without text, only OK button and end with error - maybe problem is in SETUP.INI - when I replaced it by ZakMcKracken's one it installed too). I tested some games like GLQuake, Unreal T. , Unreal T. 2003 - all OK. I also compared performance to 6600GT and found that 7300GT is slightly worse. It I will upgrade then probably to 7600GT it would also work.

You are right, maybe also some chipset problem but I think that from programmer's view the PCI-E behaves same like standard PCI. Registers are accessed same way. I also have installed INF files for i945 and ICH7 so device manager should be happy. I mean removing of legacy features. There was some standards how to controll some class of HW. Now it disappeared ad new vendor-specific come. E.g. messed up #SERR - NMI routing on all new MB causing SB Live emulation doesn't work for DOS games. Or when look at VGA - nVidia have VESA VBE 3.0 which allow set refresh rate under pure dos via standard way - they removed silently this feature and still marking their VESA BIOS 3.0 but I'm not sure now if CRTC setting is mandatory for 3.0. And more... Of course, it's about interaction between driver and hardware but when HW standard is changed you have to write a new driver (because vendor doesn't write drivers for old OS) - BUT how do you write new driver when you don't have any documantation to HW?

About shutdown problem - I'm 100% sure that it's caused by nvidia drivers because when I switch to standard PCI VGA then I can shutdown properly and even reboot to dos and return back to win. Once I switch to nV drivers it hangs again. I think it is nearly impossible to patch this bug in drivers so i'm trying to find other way. It seems that last module before reset is user.exe which is also responsible to display shutdown logo.

About shutdown problem - I'm 100% sure that it's caused by nvidia drivers because when I switch to standard PCI VGA then I can shutdown properly and even reboot to dos and return back to win. Once I switch to nV drivers it hangs again.

You have quite old system with AGP where I wouldn't expect any problems. I had Abit BX133 Raid with GF4MX440 AGP and it worked perfectly under 98SE including shutdown. The problem is nowdays screwed up mobos/bioses (I mean 9xx chipsets + PCIE)

I borrowed GF7300 PCI-E yesterday so I will try it myself...