TmEE

I had one Silicon Image SIL3114 4x SATA RAID card and it always caused stack overflow when driver got installed in win98se. I tried different BIOSes but nothing helped but I did manage to find a fix for that at cost of no SATA seen in DOS which is disconnecting !CE line of the flash on the card and tying it to 3.3V. Boot is faster, no SATA in DOS, and no stack overflow error in windows, no shutdown problems and drives show up nicely in windows with no performance problems ^^

It probably will work, I did not have to do anything but disable ACPI to get 98 boot nicely on my Athlon X2 years ago.

I used trial version, added new resolutions and never used the program again. All my resolutions are intact

I used powerstrip to add that resolution to my 9600XT and other cards driver, worked wonders every time ^^

I've been using nearly exclusively Winamp 5.35 with WMP 6.4. WMP is for instant start and listen purposes, Winamp for everything else, main reason is because it can play various synthesized sound modules via plugins such as VGM, NSF and HES files.

I recall getting this error too, and I think I just manually specified an INF and let it install in new HW wizard

BCMCOM BC875PLG(-LF) works near perfectly with Win98SE, with the exception of onboard SATA in certain configurations. http://www.bcmcom.com/bcm_search_results.asp?Product_ID=BC875PLG&level1=1&level2=&asd=%5E54

I managed to revive one 500GB drive with BSY error using home made tools, worked wonders for me

sorry for double post... In any case I have the ISA bridge fixed and also came out that my sound card just cannot get along with this bridge, several other cards worked fine though there was one that crapped out too but not as bad. Luckily YMF718 works perfectly, but YMF719 fails for some probably timing quirk it does not quite like. I will investigate it a bit further in future, probably I can fix it with some R+C stuff but who knows. SATA stuff will not work in any favorable case and for some reason the dead SATA port on my PCI RAID card popped back to life so for now I am leaving onboard SATA alone.

In that case the generic driver is not the culprit, when you can play different kind video at same res without much problems. I mostly see poor performance from such drivers, but I guess some cards work better than others. I'm soon getting a 3.2GHz/800/1M CPU in mail, perhaps I can try some stuff out, but I think I will be limited by video bandwidth as my Radeon 9600XT is not performing too well on 1680x1050. I will get a Radeon X850XT in future and that runs circles around the 9600 I got right now. nVidia is not an option, I have had nothing but trouble with their cards/drivers, but Ati almost always works flawlessly.

I would believe the bottleneck would be lack of real video driver and due to that, fast interface to video memory which limits your FPS figure to what it is, no matter what are you using, the data just cannot be moved fast enough... ?

I use bunch of sound hardware and my own devices which will be useless in a virtual machine, plus performance suffers and I don't want that.

I have found a workaround to the problem with Miranda IM not showing icons with RP which is using a different set of icons for Miranda. The ones I chose to use are available in here : http://addons.miranda-im.org/details.php?action=viewfile&id=755 Installation was not so straightforward but it fixes the missing icons problem very nicely

On 9x you really need no AV soft, I have not had any for over 3 years now and time to time scans at work with Nod32 don't reveal anything harmful. 2K I cannot comment on, but on XP you definitely need some virus protection I have had several occasions when I did a fresh install, went on to download some soft and blango the mouse went above some ad or something and I had virus infestation. PC was near useless and at that point I did reinstall as time to remove them to actually get programs run again so you could install them would have taken more time than reinstall. Windows vista and 7 seem to be quite stable, but both being current targets I would install something on it (something = anything but AVG, that one indeed is a virus...). In any case, on 9x I use nothing locally, but for all beyond I do install something.

I'm too young to be a computer pensioner, maybe after 19 years when I am 40 I have removed the ISA bridge chip from the board and now the board boots up instantly every time... makes me think the bridge chip was damaged form the beginning, especially since there is NO pins masked off, it just sits on the PCI bus like every other device... except it was not visible, though I got it visible few times... in any case I ordered replacement chips ^^ I am experimenting with RAID mode, I've got to find some drivers first, I'll report if there's any success or not

That is good to know on the drives part... And I managed to get the ISA bridge show up and I configured it for maximum delays and it made no difference... seems that all I/O operations are fine and dandy but only DMAs are affected which seems to make them uneven or too fast etc. DOS games seem to play nicely and have very minimal cracks and pops in the sound, but in windows with WSS part I get nice playback then all of a sudden I get a ton of static, and then card stops working... much like when I make the SB part play way too high sample rates.... and during the experiment one wire nicely touched something it shouldn't and now the bridge chip is dead, and BIOS seemingly hangs, but after about 5 minutes it boots and everything runs nicely, with the exception of missing ISA... I don't have an Amiga (unless CD32 counts but I never programmed anything on it plus its got some chipset damage... coloful screens on boot), but I am messing with Sega Mega Drive / Genesis, and I am building a 68K based computer ^^

You want money for your patch and I cannot blame you for that, but currently my financial situation does not allow for "convenience" expenses... I have to use my RAID card anyway, and it has 2x SATA ports that worked nicely (I think I have a bad SATA cable...) Can you shed any light on the problem ? Just bad driver coding or Win98 thinks it should do something in a "better" way...? Regarding ISA, I may have to hack the BIOS afterall... making the ISA bridge appear on a different ID upset the BIOS. I still have not verified whether there are any access signals that are masked. There has to be something that is masked, you just cannot make a device disappear, especially since the bridge does not support "hide" function... I hate x86... 68K is so much nicer

I have been through that thread and its not covering anything of interest in my case. The drives are all in IDE mode, and SATA appears as a 3rd IDE controller to the OS. None of my drives are 4K and they both are 250GB and work perfectly with my PCI RAID card (but the card started acting up), the RAID card however presents the drives as SCSI to the OS. In any case there is no native SATA happening. I can select options that make SATA natively available in which case OS sees nothing useful or make SATA replace one of the 2 IDE controllers which is not an option. I will look up some more talk around i865 chipset.

I recently got a new motherboard, the BC875PLG which has i875P chipset and ISA slot (which is a requirement for me) and that board also has 2x SATA connectors. I have installed intel drivers and everything works really well except the SATA ports. I have set SATA to "enchanced" config with IDE compatibility, so those drives appear as 3rd IDE controller to the OS. Mobo detects my 2x SATA drives and allows me to do fun on them with no issues in DOS, but in windows the drives are accessed in DOS compatibility mode and in device manager there are yellow signs on the added IDE controller entries. When I remove the drives then the signs disappear. What could be a solution to the problem ? It does seem to be a driver issue than anything else... There is one other problem too, around ISA, which is ISA being too fast and I/O recovery time too short but it seems the mobo disables Winbond PCI to ISA bridge configuration so it does not appear in any PCI device detection. Datasheets of the bridge chips show that they are a standard PCI device and can be configured accordingly... the defaults of the bridge are 8.3MHz ISA, but the BIOS configures it to give 11MHz ISA and possibly pushes IO recovery time to max too, so most of my cards struggle on the bus, my Yamaha which is main reason for ISA makes crackly sound mostly and sometimes outright static. BIOS offers absolutely no options around that part. I will modify the board a little tonight so that ID strobe will always get passed to the bridge if it isn't yet so it should become visible again, and then I can write a small program that will adjust the speed parameters before windows boots. I looked at the possibility of hacking the BIOS but it looks like it is compressed and that makes it more headache than its worth but ultimately it will be the only option when hardware+adjustment approach fails.

Flip the sticks around and see if it makes a difference, if it does then you got a faulty stick and should not use it. If the result is still same you may have a bad slot, in which case try booting with one stick in the other slot and if problem is still there with both sticks you nailed the problem.

I'll be giving this a go as soon as I get back home Sorry for late reply but : Apart from difficulties during installing devices, it works like a charm ^^ I had to juggle between OPTIONS\CABS and SYSTEM dirs to get files fed to the driver installer

My 98SE machine has been on dial up few times, something I will not want to experience again. 98SE serves as my primary hardware and software development machine, aswell as everyday use machine. I do fire up XP occasionally as there's quite some programs that do not get along with 9x, or I get an urge to play some more modern game requiring hardware that 9x lacks drivers for. One other big reason is performance, 9x is incredibly fast compared to XP or 7 on same hardware, even with years of use and hundreds of experiments and installed programs. Lack of KernelEx development will certainly make 9x live less

I once had that card and while I could get it working it was very unstable, whenever I tried to run anything DOS the driver went completely crazy and I had to reboot to gain functionality back. I could no longer shut down or reboot into MS-DOS. Regular reboot did work though

.NET stuff never works unless you disable KEX for the program

I keep everything at 32KB, I deal with a lot of small files and having a bit of headroom for them to grow helps a lot with fragmentation issues aswell.