LoneCrusader

While such a game is definitely in very poor taste, I'm not certain "public outrage" should be a sufficient justification to suppress freedom of speech or more specifically the freedom to create content, however distasteful it may be. The appropriate response is simply not to buy it, as opposed to silencing whoever produced it. Banning a game will not bring back the dead nor prevent evil/sick people from doing evil/sick things. But this is OT for this thread anyway.

Why are you using a VIA update on a computer that doesn't have a VIA chipset? In any case please provide a link to this update and I will see what, if anything it changes that could affect USB. I have encountered at least one situation where an Intel USB1 controller on an MSI motherboard would cause Windows 95 to hang but did not affect Windows 98SE. The same VID&PID controller on a different motherboard did not have this issue, so it's possible the problem is purely hardware related. The few ATI/AMD chipsets I have encountered have not been 9x-friendly at all.

In general I would advise anyone to avoid "prefab" (Dell/HP/Compaq/eMachines/etc.) computers for any type of gaming build and especially for Windows 9x builds. From my experience with certain Dell machines that originally came with XP, Dell seems to make subtle undocumented changes to the motherboards which can cause the onboard devices to not always function as expected despite having 9x-compatible drivers. Also they frequently use garbage OEM BIOS'es which not only severely limit the options available to the user but can even cause wide incompatibilities and annoyances when trying to run Windows 9x. Also avoid any Intel-branded motherboard later than the D875PBZ for this same reason. Intel chipset-based boards by say Gigabyte, MSI, etc. are fine, just as long as they use AWARD BIOS or something else besides Intel. I personally like P4's and have a whole stockpile of P4-compatible hardware. But if you're going to do this, don't settle for anything less than 3GHz and 4GB of RAM, especially if you plan to dual-boot with XP.

Really? Good. Now, for the sake of posterity and to assist anyone else who might have trouble finding this information, please describe in detail: 1) what steps you took in your experiment(s), 2) what specific driver version(s) you experimented with, 3) which specific non-9x-supported ATI card(s) you tried modifying the drivers to work with, 4) what specific other hardware was used during the test(s) including motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc., 5) which specific version of Windows 9x you were using in your experiment(s), 6) what version of DirectX were you running, 7) what other drivers, if any, were installed on the system at the time of the experiment, 8) what other software was installed, if any, that might be relevant to the issue, and 9) any other information that could be helpful to someone to reproduce your results. When you have done this, then we will know just how thorough your input is on the subject. Even more interesting. Please provide some direct links to pages documenting experiments on the subject. I highly doubt the number will approach 20, much less 100. A bunch of people saying "can I do this?" to be answered with "no it won't work" does not count as an "experiment." Too young? Not likely, but irrelevant. So, "Omega Rad" drivers have been "really good at getting newer cards to run on 98"? OK, please list for us which specific newer cards they provide support for that Catalyst 6.2 did not and which specific version to look for? And, JFYI, Windows 9x can and does run just fine and "fully work" on plenty of motherboards with PCI Express chipsets with a few unofficial updates. Many games that came out just before everyone started dropping 9x support can very well benefit from more improved or more modern hardware, whether it be a newer video card or more than the standard amount of RAM. WarCraft III and Rise of Nations are two specific examples that I've played myself. I've seen both lag during big battles when running on a 3GHz P4 with 2GB of RAM. I could not imagine running either one of these games on such an antique as you seem to think is "adequate" to build a proper Windows 9x machine. And, also FYI, I can have 4GB of RAM "stable" under Windows 9x, and so can anyone else.

Maybe not. But if everyone here had always taken that attitude about experimentation then many of the things we now know to be working would have remained hidden. Don't be so ready to rule out things before they have been tried. Now yes, in this particular case I doubt that any ATI cards newer than the X850 XT PE can be used. However I also don't know how much effort was ever put into changing that either. If no one had taken the time to try with nVidia, then we would have no 7xxx card support. Don't be surprised if few here share this opinion. My opinion is that there is no good reason to artificially limit your hardware. Why slow any computing experience down on purpose? Most all of these "older programs" will benefit from higher performance, other than maybe some DOS game that requires slow CPU cycles. DOSBox is the answer for this.

Palladium Lunaris

Despite claiming compatibility, the newer versions of CPU-Z are missing the VXD file that is required for the program to do anything under 9x. I recently tried to use the newer version of CPU-Z + the VXD from an older build and if I'm remembering correctly I got a BSOD. I don't remember offhand what the system specs were, but it was a "newer" machine.

You can add the Streaming Proxy manually in the same way you added PCI Bus to your setups. In my experience it always gets reinstalled when a new Audio device is installed anyway but I don't have any USB Audio devices, only add-in cards.

No. As far as I know there are no .VXD drivers for anything USB. And no .VXD drivers for anything HD Audio either; hence why we need a permanent solution to the 98SE WDM Audio problem.

Issues when using an audio device with WDM (.SYS) drivers as opposed to 95-style (.VXD) drivers seem to have been around for a long time. I turned up this old thread elsewhere where they were having trouble getting audio output to be produced and volume control to be available when using WDM drivers. Despite the title it is hardly "resolved." Anyone else here experienced issues with WDM-driver audio devices? Did you find a solution? I've seen some issues myself but found no immediate solution other than to use the 95 ,VXD drivers when available. We need to find a solution for this, not a workaround. (especially if any "newer" audio devices are ever to be backported )

I understand completely. I'll always prefer Windows 95 OSR2 over any later version. I didn't have good experiences with 98FE so for a long time I resisted using even 98SE; but once I was forced to use it for something I wanted to do I found that 98SE works well for the few things that 95 won't do. You're lucky that you've been able to get these systems to run with so much RAM. I have never been able to get a 9x system to boot with more than 512MB no matter how many tweaks I tried. The only time I saw 98SE boot with more than 512MB was when I experimented with an older version of the Unofficial Service Pack. It booted with 1GB but it was really unstable and crashed after a few minutes. This issue seems to vary widely across different hardware configurations.

Interesting that ABCDEFG's system appears to be 98FE, not 98SE. I wonder if 98FE somehow better handles more ram? Doesn't make sense, but...

Did you install the RAM patch using the /M switch? This switch is specifically to address issues with Gigabit Ethernet cards and may help...

I used to prefer AMD back in the days of Super Socket 7 and K6-II (I even have an ultra-rare 570MHz one of these), but once I stepped up from them to Pentium 4 I never looked back. I've not had a lot of experience with AMD systems since then, but a friend of mine had a prefab Compaq machine that was AMD and it was junk (very slow, but to be fair I don't remember what the CPU specs were). Also it seemed that when multi-core CPU's became mainstream AMD relied too much on multiple cores instead of raw clock speed (which to me is more important, especially for 9x) and at least for a while did not keep up with Intel. I've tried only three AMD systems since then myself and they each have at least one weird, annoying problem or another under 9x (but they're all nForce chipset based as well, so that may be part of the issue). So I'm not much of an AMD fan these days. To each his own I suppose. YMMV.

SETUP /p i is virtually mandatory for any new system and also for those going back a few years now. Windows 98 supported ACPI to a point when it was introduced but modern systems are using newer implementations of ACPI that are completely incompatible with 9x. There is no way to fix this short of writing a new ACPI.SYS driver from scratch. The 2K version uses NTOSKRNL.EXE functions for memory allocation and such that cannot be backported to 98SE in any reasonable manner, if at all. ACPI is pretty useless anyway; APM will handle things just fine in most cases. At most you might get the "It is now safe to turn off your computer" screen and have to switch power off manually when you shutdown, but this is just like the old AT days when 9x was young. The /p i switch should be usable with other switches with the correct syntax, but I've not tried this. If the INF's have the 1-06-2015 date then it didn't pick up the newer ones I linked for you during install. DO NOT mix USP3 files with NUSB! They do not share the same approach and use different selections of files. If you wish to use USP3 then you should add this later after other things have been sorted out. USBD.SYS should be extracted to \WINDOWS\OPTIONS\CABS or something like that by NUSB. If not you can manually extract it from the NUSB package. NUSB3.6 uses the Windows ME SYSDM.CPL which is known to have some minor cosmetic bugs under 98SE. Other bugs may be lurking undiscovered this is why I recommended 3.5 for now. Not sure about having to change the IRQ or about the freeze. I haven't seen this but it may depend on your BIOS/hardware. ACPI, not AHCI. ACPI = power management. AHCI = disk controller mode. Yes, this is the reason for no automatic power shutoff at shutdown as I mentioned above. You will just have to deal with this on newer systems where ACPI is incompatible with 9x. Leaving ACPI enabled brings on far worse problems. I have an old Intel G41 chipset board where 98SE will not even boot if it is installed without the /p i switch. (This gives you an idea how long ACPI has been incompatible.) I have that too. Windows 9x doesn't know what DMI2 is. Probably no fix for it, but it remains to be seen whether or not it causes any actual problem besides an error in the Device Manager Don't worry about this for now. USB Composite Devices are somewhat unexplored territory. Not sure how to solve this. Simply removing them and reinstalling them might help. What are these devices so we can see if anyone has successfully used them before with 9x? Overwriting or renaming the older INFs to some other file extension such as .TXT should work. If the new INFs were not picked up and copied during installation you may have to manually put them in \WINDOWS\INF. As rloew said that is the HDA controller. No working 9x drivers (and it keeps defeating all our efforts to backport one from 2K, so it doesn't look promising.) The USB3 controllers also have no working drivers of course. I added a generic do-nothing entry to my USB.INF to move them under the USB section and prevent them from showing up as Unknown Devices.

Yes; I have an nForce4 Chipset AMD system that literally takes that long to boot because HIMEM.SYS makes a wrong assumption. Adding one line to CONFIG.SYS solved this. All you have to do is not use HIMEM.EXE and add a line to CONFIG.SYS specifying the option for HIMEM.SYS. If it solves the problem, then great. If not, switch back and you've only lost a few minutes.

I've never been able to stand D2 long enough to get very far. I agree 100%, running around outside in all these different areas lacks the atmosphere that the original had. Hellfire expansion is nice too. but so many things were left incomplete. The Hell mod fixes some of these but I haven't been able to fool with it for a couple of years now. I can't access that link without a login apparently. But anyway, back on topic. 9x gaming.. yes, back in the day. Before my friends and I all had to worry about work and bills and such. Wow, I wonder how that happened. I thought that option had disappeared some time ago.

I've dealt with them before on eBay. Scored a couple of Gigabyte GA-G1975X boards. Have one set up here somewhere with a 3.73GHz CPU + 8GB of Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM and running Windows 95/98SE. This was part of my "Intel chipset testing" I've mentioned in other threads.

I think it's possible to change the background color using CONFIG.SYS and ANSI escape codes like I did for the text color in FIX95CPU. It's been so long I've forgotten.

Yes. Nah. This is more my style. I don't claim those weird, arrogant people claiming to be Romulans in The Next Generation.

I may be the source of this confusion. I thought the Shutdown Patch still had to be applied manually and said that somewhere.

Use these two INF's to replace the corresponding ones from my main INF package for your X99 system. Set your BIOS disk controllers to IDE mode. Get rid of AHCI for this test. Do a clean install of 98SE using "SETUP /p i" to get rid of ACPI for this test. Use rloew's RAM patch + SATA patch + SATA.INF. Install NUSB 3.5 when you reach the desktop to place the USB2 INF + drivers before detection. You shouldn't have to reboot here if no USB controllers were previously detected. Manually copy USBD.SYS from NUSB to WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS. Manually install "PCI Bus" and do not let the system reboot until it has stopped finding new devices and leaves you on the desktop. Do not install anything else such as NVidia drivers or USP3 before you reboot and verify that system devices have been detected and your HDD controllers are working. Report your results. Note for anyone else: the linked package is really for ruthan only; not all X99 devices were added, only the ones from his SCANPCI log. A full update to my INF package will come sometime in the future. Edited later to simplify USB/USB2 section.

No, because to do so would make other parts of this thread not make sense when things are removed. While this post is not strictly on-topic, the original poster (ragnargd) asked a question directly of MrMateczko and received a response. Only later did MrMateczko attempt to use this system in an "everyday" 9x build. The post you quoted fits better here in its original context.

I think I may have figured out why the INF's didn't work for you on the X99 system. I thought I had updated the package more recently. It is possible I do not have all of the ID's present in the current version to cover X99. I did some work on it several months ago and I included what I had done in my own install media but I must not have updated the public package. I'll try to give it an update when I can. Got a lot of things going on right now and I can't work on it yet. I see Diablo! Definitely one of my favorites. Can't stand the sequels though.

No, I'm not using any cards for USB on the X99 system. Only the onboard Intel USB2. I don't know if the rear ports would work or not without NUSB 3.5 (my installation source is slipstreamed with this already in it) but I highly doubt it. This and many other newer board have USB2 controllers but no USB1 controllers, so unless a USB2 driver is loaded (and USBD.SYS manually placed or added to be copied in USB2.INF) then there will be no USB functionality under 98SE.