LoneCrusader

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.

I just said I don't have one of those PCI-E cards. I have a PCI USB2 card from that company that does indeed use an NEC chipset. It is recognized by the standard drivers from NUSB 3.5. It does not require any special rituals in order to use USB Storage Devices.

There may be more 95-compatible drivers available than you think. Post all the specs of the system here. Grab the SCANPCI tool rloew attached to ruthan's X99 chipset thread and run it in DOS before Windows loads. Post the output here so I can see what specific Device ID's are in your computer.

I split the posts concerning the X99 system from the Compatible Hardware thread and put them in this thread where they make more sense. The Compatible Hardware thread is meant to be for confirmed hardware, not hardware under experimentation. Let's try to keep on topic in different threads.

Did you run SCANPCI on your X99 system? I don't see any Intel ID's in that list. OK, saw this in the other thread. I see ACPI issues for certain. ACPI controller and motherboard resources causing problems. This is very common. You need to install Windows 98 with the "SETUP /p i" command to prevent ACPI from loading. Then do not remove any devices and manually install PCI Bus. If your motherboard BIOS allows setting the SATA controllers to IDE Mode then you shouldn't need AHCIBIOS unless you want to use AHCI in another OS.

I don't have one of those, I just found it while looking for something else. I have another card made by that company however and it works flawlessly. Sure there are probably cheaper ones that will work fine. That was just an example from a company that seems to have good quality. Sometimes you get what you pay for though. Buy cheap junk, get cheap junk. I think the card you linked is listed wrong anyway. It claims USB 2.0 in the title but in the description it says Renesas USB 3.0 chip. This definitely won't work.

Don't confuse the SIIG card that I linked that uses the same chipset with the PCI-E card I linked before on eBay. They are not the same. I only said they have the same chipset so they should work with the same driver. Miscommunication created somehow above. The one on eBay is definitely PCI-E.

Is it still bundling adware? Version 2.5.0.0 was the last before they started this, I hope they have removed it by now.

Yes, PCI Bus must be added manually. This has been an issue on some boards all the way back to around the 965 chipset. It depends on the type of BIOS the board has and may vary between manufacturers as well. I haven't had to take any other steps to detect devices. Sometimes when a PCI-E card is added another "bridge" will be detected, but I believe this is to be expected.

Ouch. Looks like you can never be too careful. I used the driver CD that comes with the card. If need be I can upload the driver somewhere. rloew mentioned a PCI card using this chipset to me before. The driver should be usable with a PCI-E version.

USB2 cards come in PCI-E as well. EXSYS EX-11066. And it even has an NEC chipset. Best for compatibility IMO.

Possibly some miscommunication about removing devices in the various threads. Is this a clean install or a moved install? If it's a clean one you do not want to remove any devices that actually did get detected before installing the PCI Bus. Then after installing it more devices should appear. It is very strange that this is not happening, you may be right about something on that board not working properly. Newer systems use an ACPI enumerator before a PCI enumerator so that's why PCI Bus does not get automatically installed; 9X does not recognize the newer ACPI controllers and therefore doesn't know what to do with them. But I suppose we should continue the discussion of this system in your X99 thread.

Yes, the INF's really only provide correct device names. A system should work just fine without them, but it is nice to get correct specific names to help identify problems and to prevent having a list of "Unknown Devices" and "PCI cards". All Intel INF packages are like this; none of them (even the old 9x compatible versions) actually contain any driver files such as .VXD, .SYS, .PDR, .MPD, etc etc. I will probably be using XP/XP x64 on the system as well when I put it into everyday use. Right now I have an adequate system for browsing online with XP x64 (P67 chipset) and I have it along with several other machines which need to have their contents archived and transferred to any newer system I would use on a daily basis. I haven't needed to move up yet, and I will have to set aside time to do so. Unfortunately I haven't had time to do any gaming with my newer systems yet. It's part of my plan, but real life and work and such always seem to get in my way and must therefore take precedence. Also doesn't help that my friends who I used to game with all have the same issues now. No, not a power problem with the OS or shutdown. A hardware power problem on the motherboard itself. I kept expecting it to fry, so I stopped fooling with it. I think this board was a RMA that an eBay seller somehow got ahold of (and of course resold AS-IS). I will check the USB3 ports later. If your USB Storage is not working you might want to read this issue I had with a X58 board and experiment with the BIOS settings that I found to be the culprit. Not yet. I will get to it eventually (probably not soon, other projects are currently ongoing).