I recently upgraded my KT400A Asrock board to another Asrock: 4CoreDual-SATA2 rev2.0 and attempted to install 98SE using an agp 7600GT, 2 gig of DDR and then 4 gig of DDR2 (both from GSkill and using an unofficial 1.14a pc-treiber bios), E7400 cpu, and sata drives for storage and optical, with a small ide for swapfile and browser cache. 98se installed just fine so long as certain parameters are met. In BIOS, the sata drives need to be set to RAID mode, and jumpered to SATAI (150). Otherwise, you'll get degraded drive compatibility mode. Anything using InstallShield will go very slow and will mostly likely lockup unless those steps are taken. This was especially true for the VIA 4in1 package. For sound, you will need an aftermarket card, as the onboard RealTek ALC662 is only for XP and higher. The VIA drivers (523A) for the P880 were just a bit flaky, with Falcon Storage only for W2K and higher. That was largely worked around by jumpering the sata drive. Preloading esdi_506.pdr, and using W98IOPAT.EXE alongside HIMEM.EXE (for the high memory issues), everything started to run pretty smooth. Be careful with your memory selections if you use this board. DDR2 voltages are 2.0/1.9/1.8 while DDR are 2.7/2.6/2.5. Those values are not given, being High, Normal and Low. Try to match the Low vdimm to allow you a little bit of overhead for tolerances. My GSkill DDR2 are rated at 1.8-1.9 but run best at 1.9. VIA's ndism 114A installed from the XP\X86 directory works just fine for the network drivers. No 98SE drivers are offered on the motherboard's install cd. Other quirks of this board have been fairly explored at AnandTech's forums here. The dealbreaker for me was SATAI and no onboard sound, since my Audigy SE (P17 chip) is incompatible with 98se. I didn't want to have to jumper my primary drive whenever I switched between XP and 98se, and was loathe to run XP in half-speed mode. Seeing how I mainly wanted to attempt a 98se install for my Dark Engine games, the nosound was just a bit too hard to swallow. For clarity, I used UBCD 98SE (which required my 98se .cab files), MDGx's unofficial NV8629, VIA's 523A driverpack, and Sophoric's Autopatchers from Dec07 (294meg) and Dec08 (45meg). The Autopatchers pretty much caught anything UBCD missed. Plus, UBCD has a fair selection of post-install goodies. If the regular driver install methods fail, update them through the Device Manager. For further reference, the 4CoreDual-SATA2 has 2 IDE, 2 SATA, one 10/100 Full Duplex NIC, and 6 USB, as well as front panel headers for USB and Sound, though I don't think the HD sound will be possible. There is also a PCI-E graphics port with 1x-4x speed, but again there may be issues under 98SE. Hope this helps.
