Tommy

I can help you with this a bit. Drivers won't magically work after installing KernelEx. It will help somewhat but it depends on what you want to run. Blackwingcat has a bunch of modded NVIDIA and AMD drivers on his website but generally you need to modify the INF file of the driver in order for Windows to see it. I've never gotten that down pat though. Which drivers are you looking to run? You can easily dual boot Windows 2000 and Windows 10 on the same computer. I do this myself in fact. Install Windows 2000 first, then install Window 10. Windows 10 has a cool boot menu which gives you access to your mouse and you can manually click on the OS you want to use. My main rig uses a Core i5 2500 and it runs with no issues whatsoever. I would also check out Tomasz86's HFSLIP repository as far as updates are concerns. https://twilczynski.com/windows/ Slipstream those updates in a clean ISO file of Windows 2000 SP4 using HFSLIP. Then I'd install a slightly older version of KernelEx, like early 20s version, and then start installing the later versions. Windows doesn't seem to take well from just jumping right up from nothing to KernelEx 3.0 or whatever version we're on now. Also, make sure to install Extended Core as well, if your laptop utilizes a Realtek HD audio codec, you can use the PAE switch and utilize the full 8GBs of RAM in your computer. Heck, I have 32GBs in mine and it sees every single bit of it.

Hmm, I didn't take a full look at it but I wonder if Belleville was removed from Mafia II, it's the very same track that was played on Central Island by Django Reinhardt and that was certainly removed from the original Mafia release. I didn't see it on the list but then one of the fsb files may have contained it with a filename that I didn't recognize. I'm also not sure about low settings either. But I believe you can dial it down quite a bit. When I open up setup.exe, it looks like the lowest resolution is 640x480 and I'm not sure if compressed or low detail graphics would yield better results. Yep, I'm 100% aware of this problem as well. In fact I knew something was off even on my older PC, I had an HP Pavilion 532w that had a 1.7GHz Celeron and even then, I could never beat those two missions and I thought it was me who just sucked at it. But years down the road when I finally had internet access of my own where I could research this problem, I found out it was a processor issue because of the way the game is programmed. Rather than relying on timer events, it somehow utilized processor speed itself so the faster and better the processor was, the faster the explosions were. I remember in the day, I'd even try pushing the Bolt Model T with a fast car and usual it resulted in the car managing to go over the bridge rails or something stupid like that. There are other similar problems in older games with faster processors. One really old one comes to mind is Roger Wilco 6, The Spinal Frontier. There was an issue that if your processor was over 100mhz and you scanned your ID card at the Com-Post, the game would crash. (Funny, completely off the wall and offtopic but that game made me laugh because Sierra would insert a message every time you'd quit the game and one of them was, "Aren't you glad your middle name isn't Lawrence?" Well, turns out that IS my middle name. ) They weren't lying when they said to check the readme with processors over 100mhz. There was a workaround you could do involving Turbo or there was a savegame file on the disk that got you past that part and you could continue playing. Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed/Porsche 2000 also has a problem with fast processors. The game automatically determines graphic detail based on processor speed and I believe if you have a processor that is either over 2GHz or 3GHz, the game automatically defaulted to low graphics and even if you manually selected higher graphic details, they were ignored and your car and everything would look like complete trash, that's if the game even loaded at all which it would sometimes just crash at the titlescreen. Luckily someone figured out how to fix that so now it runs as it is suppose to but I'm sure there were times when these games were made, there were fast shortcuts around certain engine limitations that weren't known to have problems with better hardware. But back to Mafia, I'm quite familiar with the internal workings as I've done plenty of Mafia hacking in the past. The code makes sense but is a mess and truly not organized that well. However, I do like some of the editing tools people have released for it. I made some of the common handguns so powerful that if you shot at a car while it was being driven by an NPC, it would start flying and tumbling in the air just from the sheer force of the bullet. Fun and games until you'd hit a gangster's car with it and they had that model handgun and shot you with it, it was generally insta-death which then you go in and edit Tommy's health and add up to 99,999 hit points. I believe any number higher than that would cause problems. Regardless of how corrupted the number looked, you had that much health. You could make Paulie and Sam completely invincible because they had a secondary value that would allow you to change how hit points are multiplied and changing the number, you could give them not only 99,999 hit points but also change the multiplier to the point that you could shoot them with a Thompson and they'd literally never even take 1 point of damage. The only exception to that rule is Shotgun/Sawed Off Shotguns. If you're shot in close range, it doesn't matter, you're dead. But one more interesting tidbit. Getting hit in person by a Tram is NOT insta-death. I haven't figured out how to change the values dealt by them but as long as you have that much health, you can stand in front of the tram and take damage like crazy but you will not die. My edited Mafia game has Freeride which not only has a toned down light setting so it's not so yellow/orangish (sunny as hell) tint to it, but you're also accompanied by Paulie, Sam, and Don Salieri himself. All have Colt 1911s except Salieri who is still wielding his Smith and Wesson Magnum (with almost unlimited ammo, of course). Only downfall is you can only drive four door cars and if you don't start with a four door car, they'll start at the bar and have to run to you, otherwise you all start in the car. But something weird is I noticed in certain places, they get stuck and refuse to walk. This usually occurs in Oakhill or a few other random, off the beaten path places. They'll just stand there and they will only pivot in place but you could literally go to the North Pole, they will not follow you unless you manage to knock them out of place that is preventing them from walking. All these years later, I still haven't figured out why this happens.

Here's something that I don't think gets a lot of thought, but at the same time, we need to remain vigilant of it. Those who many not dualboot and use Windows 2000 natively will notice that new printers are getting harder and harder to find that support Windows 2000. That's where I want this thread to come in. I'm now the proud owner of a brand new HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw printer and of course, the oldest OS it supports is Windows XP Service Pack 3, which is honestly surprising in itself. So on my quest to find something that worked, I took note that Windows 2000 does have a native Color LaserJet driver available by default, the HP Color LaserJet 8500PS driver. You actually can use the Universal Print Driver v4.7 but to be honest, the above driver works better as the colors seem a bit more true to what they should be, the UPD makes your color images a bit dark. I decided to take my chances and was pleasantly surprised, this driver WORKS on Windows 2000 for this printer. It communicates without a hitch and prints just fine in color. Now, who can truly argue with that? There may be other, better ones that may work but I felt the need to document this right now and also to just start a thread of printers that are working on Windows 2000 in the year 2020 and beyond. This is one of HP's latest LaserJets so that is fantastic to have a driver working that doesn't even need to be a universal driver. I have not tested this as far as a direct connection goes though as this is communicating over my network wirelessly. Once I get another Ethernet cable, I'm quite positive I will be hardwiring it instead as a direct wire connection is not only faster but more reliable though the router is only 4 feet away from the printer in the next room. So please, share what you guys find and lets keep Windows 2000 going as long as we can while keeping it as functional as we can! Printing is certainly a fundamental so we need a database that we can ensure proper replacements as our aging hardware fails.

I'm not surprised since the original Mafia cut all of Django Reinhardt's music plus a few other tracks from other artists like the Mills Brothers, etc. But I'm very curious to know which tracks were cut in Mafia II's Director's Cut. As for the original Mafia, you'd be surprised how frugal it was. That's why people criticize it today for looking aged. But come on, people! What did you expect for a game that could run natively on Windows 98 and a Pentium III 500mhz processor? If anything, that game totally rocks for its age and needs to be appreciated and respected for the awesome gameplay at the time. We're all too used to today's graphics and the sky is the limit graphics, amount of actors at any given time, and overall special effects. But back in 2003, we didn't have the high end stuff we do now and whether people agree with me or not, both of these games are awesome in my book, even today. Heck, many say that Mafia II needs a remaster. Call me old fashion but I thought Mafia II was BEAUTIFUL as it was and a huge improvement over the original Mafia game. There are a few things that could be touched up but the game is just quite polished as it is if you ask me!

Welcome to MSFN! It's a great place to hang out and geek out so I hope you enjoy it!

It's been a while since I've logged in here so I'm glad to see you're still posting. I really hope that you and the family are doing well and that some sort of comfort is starting to set in. Rudy's death really hit hard for me for several reasons. One of them because even though I wouldn't consider him a great friend, I still considered him a friend and I really respected him. But also, because of what led him to passing away. Heart problems run in my family. I'm 30 going on 31 in a few months and I'm also extremely overweight. I was literally in a race car speeding towards heart problems and other awful stuff. Since his passing, I started eating healthier and a lot less. I stopped binging all together and no longer have the desire to stuff myself full of sweets. I also joined the local gym and I work out four to five times a week now. Since the end of September I'm down 22 pounds and I'm feeling great! My knee no longer hurts when I walk and I'm not completely wiped out after walking only four blocks. I still have a super long journey ahead of me but considering how hard life was getting for me and then Rudy's unfortunate passing, it really started clicking that I needed to do something otherwise it won't be long and I'd end up joining him. So while this is really for me in the end, I want to dedicate a part of this to Rudy's memory, a great man taken from us way too early.

I can assure you that tone won't help you develop a positive rapport in the community. You are right, it is your problem. MSFN is built around helping people as best as we can and I understand your frustrations, especially when you are under pressure and I know first hand that sometimes you really cannot find what you need online and that Google isn't always your friend. But you also need to realize that we all have personal lives outside the forum and cannot always accommodate time sensitive topics. I'm not saying anything to be mean or nasty, but it's the honest truth.

I have never gotten so PO'd at a computer in my life, but that has changed with this board in my main rig. Here's what I got in it, which doesn't make much difference but the information is here for the sake of completeness. E3-1220 Xeon Processor 120GB Samsung SSD 250GB WD Blue SSD 1TB WD HDD EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 24GBs of RAM 2-4GB Hynix and 2-8GB Samsung EVGA 500w 80+ PSU The only thing I have not tested is the PSU, but I do not (think) it's the issue. So here's what is going on. It starts acting peculiar when restarting from Windows. Yes, I said restarting. The computer will actually turn off for about 3-5 seconds and automatically turn itself back on. It will then start to POST as if I had restarted the computer. With Award BIOS based motherboards, it will generally skip the processor information and single beep upon a simple reboot, at least that's been my experience with how Gigabyte boards act. Now this is where it starts getting poopy. Most of the time, if it's going to do the reboot loop thing, it usually stops when it is time to detect the RAM. It will hang for a few seconds and then shut off. After 3-5 seconds, it will turn itself back on but this time it will beep once and display everything as if I did a cold startup. Then there's a 50 to 80% chance it will stop at the memtest area again and repeat the turn off and turn back on boot loop. Although there are times that it won't reach the memtest and it will get stuck again and then just power off and power back on. So while I'm not going to say it can't be the RAM because one of the things I have tried is taking out all sticks of RAM except for one and I have also swapped different sticks out, no difference. Although, sometimes it will boot just fine while taking no action, but this is where it gets strange again. Windows 2000 will boot just fine 100% of the time. Once POST is done and control is handed off to the bootloader, it will never turn itself back off on its own. However, Windows 7 most of the time will not boot properly and will freeze on the boot screen just before control is handed off to the operating system. If I start it in safe mode, it will boot into the GUI. No problem! Normal mode, will not though. I did get it to boot into normal mode once. I tried system restore but it had failed. I also ran the Windows 7 memory tester and it didn't seem to find any issues with the RAM. I haven't tried memtest yet but I may just to thoroughly test out the RAM just to be certain something isn't going on with all the sticks for some reason. So Windows 2000 is fine and I can run it under load and nothing weird happens, I don't get any blue screens, no random restarts or shut downs, it just works like nothing was wrong. Now, here are all the things I have tried so far. Disconnected all hard drives from motherboard, no difference. Swapped RAM modules and tested in different slots, no difference. Swapped video cards, no difference. Removed video card all together, beeps 4 times and then shuts off by itself after about 10 seconds and turns itself back on again, so no difference apparently. I reseated all power connectors on motherboard, no difference. Although if it were a power/supply issue, I'm pretty sure this behavior would be much more consistent or be a problem even during normal operation within Windows. I did not do anything with the CPU, but again, I think if it were a CPU issue, it would be apparent during normal operation and not just during POST. It's not an overheating issue either as I do monitor that closely and my heatsink is huge along with the fan. It's actually the coolest (running) system I've ever built, no pun intended. I reflashed the BIOS with the latest version (which it was already running but I flashed it again just to be sure there wasn't something weird going on with it), no difference. I've replaced the CMOS battery, which the original was fine anyway since I tested it with a multimeter and it was reading 3 volts. But this is where things got a bit weirder, but more on that in a minute. I've even used a can of air to blow out the system, just in case a piece of dirt was causing issues in shorting something out, no change there either. I've also switched between loading fail-safe and optimized defaults in the BIOS, neither makes a difference. I've also took the CMOS battery out, left it out, killed power to the system to force settings to go back to factory defaults, no difference. This is where it gets even weirder yet. Apparently, it doesn't like being turned on without a battery. I would turn on the system, the green LED would flick on just a bit and go right back off again and sometimes even trying to turn it back on wouldn't do a thing at all, I would have to kill power at the power supply itself, turn it back on, and then it would do the same thing where the green light would flick on and then go right back out again. Put a battery back in, turns on like it should but will still do the boot loop thing half to most of the time. Going back to swapping video cards, I put my older PNY NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT Energy Efficient card in, which doesn't require separate power and with this card, it will show card information before the POST screen for a few seconds and sometimes it would freeze on that screen before even getting to POST and then do the boot loop thing, which is why again, I'm thinking it's not the RAM. It did not originally do this when I assembled the system. We did have a brief power outage the other day caused by heavy wind and it was out for about 10 seconds. Both my computer and router (I'm hard-wired into it) have power protecting surge protectors (they aren't just cheap power strips), but the router itself is fine and displays no issues so I don't think that would cause an issue as I would think if there was a fault on either end, both devices would be affected in some way or another but the internet works fine and when I get into Windows on the affected PC, the internet works fine. So now I'm at a complete loss. I have no clue what else to try. I've read that others have had issues with the z68 based Gigabyte boards but some act as though they know what they're talking about when others describe this problem. There's a massive thread over on overclockers.net about the P67/Z68 reboot loop, but nobody has really come up with an actual answer on why this happens. I don't overclock anyway, but I did try a few of the suggestions listed in the thread and none of it made a difference. Anyone else think of something I'm missing? I'm going out of my mind with this issue and 8 years later, I'd think someone would have the answer to this problem. I'd like to think there's a solution otherwise I'm probably going to end up exorcising this board. While I'm on the subject, does anyone have any recommendations on a possible LGA1155 replacement? I've used Gigabyte since 2012 but I'm really thinking about switching to something else but I don't really have expertise in other board brands, but I'm open-minded to other brands. The only real requirements I have is that it needs to have 4 RAM slots and a PS/2 port. A parallel port would be nice but as long as I have a PCI slot, I can put an addon card in so it's not a huge deal. I'm just thinking the Gigabyte board is trash and I'm not willing to take another chance on any other z68 boards from them, regardless of model or revision number. Thanks for taking the time to read!

Wow, this is awesome! Thank you very much for this. It's certainly appreciated especially during this hard time for you. Don't feel obligated to rush things, take all the time you need. We're all just so glad that his "presence" didn't just go cold and nobody knows what happened to him so thank you for continuing to login and update us on things. I'm hoping that you've been able to find some sort of comfort in this difficult time considering tomorrow will be a month since your dad's passing. It's still hard on some of us, myself included, but we're getting through it. I'm just sorry I never got to talk to him and know him on more of a personal level.

I haven't been in the Win98 game for a little while now but I'm considering within the next week on getting parts from my previous main rig into a new case and install Win98 on it. Once I do that, I'll test out the new SSL protocol and report back with any findings I come up with.

Wow, that is quite a timeline you have provided here. Let me first start out by saying thank you ever so much for posting this and giving those that "knew" him some closure. I know @LoneCrusader will probably appreciate seeing this post as well because he and your dad kept in contact a lot and worked on projects together. I'm glad it also helped to get it off your chest as well, so it benefited all of us in the end. I still feel very sad over the loss and in time we will all heal but it sounds like he was quite a trooper through the whole thing but unfortunately just wasn't strong enough to come through. But some of us truly liked your father and he was always welcome here. As a small token of our gratitude, we promoted his account that you're using to the patrons group which is reserved for those who have had a special impact here or retired staff members. We know it's not much but it's all we can really offer along with our most sincere condolences. While you may or may not have much use being here, please be aware that you're certainly most welcome in the community, even if you just want to talk to some of us who were close to your dad. Not a lot of people would have done what you did but I know myself and others will be more at peace with your dad's untimely passing. Again, thank you ever so much for the update!

Thank you for the update. I was aware of the compilation a few days ago but I wanted to hold off here until we had official confirmation on the family's wishes on his patches. Since we have gotten the word, we're allowing them to be posted publicly on here. Is there a way to add tags to help those find these easier? I noticed it has to be very specific, so is there a way to add rloew to the package so that if someone happened to search for rloew, it would bring them to the same directory?

First off, let me thank you ever so much for coming here to post an update, you have no idea how much it is appreciated. Second, I personally want to extend my sincerest condolences for your loss, to you and the rest of the family. We truly enjoyed having your dad as part of our community. Heh, my heart actually started racing when I saw his username had posted, thinking that somehow we got a bum steer and he was coming to tell us that he was still alive. But back to seriousness, we understand that it's probably a very busy time for you and the family and we want you to take all the time you need to grieve and take care of important business. But know that even though we didn't get to meet him personally, he was still a friend around here and we treasured the time we had with him. If I may ever be so brazen, was his passing expected or unexpected? You don't have to answer if you don't want to but it may help some of the hurt that some of us feel and give us some closure. Again, thank you so much for coming and posting this update for us! It really helps to keep up in the loop of things. I'm sure some of our users will greatly appreciate his work not being lost to the world, especially those who are as diehard Win9x users as your dad was.

That doesn't sound too good. Being an authorized reseller, you'd think they'd be quicker to respond. As I mentioned before, I wonder if Mr. Loew knew his time was coming and left specific instructions on his projects and website. Why would his website go down shortly after his passing? I just have that sneaking feeling he knew something was wrong and took care of some things before his demise. Again, that's just speculation but it's an educated speculation because if it was sudden, I'd think his website would still be active. We may need to try following some leads but I don't want to do it too soon because I want to make sure the family has proper grieving time before we start inquiring about his products. But I'm sure I feel the same way, we don't want his projects to become lost forever because that would indeed be a huge blow to the vintage computing community. Has anyone took a look at his LinkedIn profile? His credentials are very impressive if I do say so myself. He was indeed a very intelligent gentleman.

There has definitely been talk about his products. @Tripredacus has tried to contact C.C. Anderson but I do not know if he's been successful or not. I certainly hope we can get some sort of reply and shine light on the current state of his work. We're definitely not going to let his work be up for grabs on this forum unless one of his family members or C. C. Anderson says otherwise. Despite his passing, Rudolph Loew has put a lot of his time and work into making these products and we don't want to see anyone posting his stuff on here or links to his stuff unless his distributor or one of his family members gives the okay to/provides it themselves. We can't control what the net posts outside of MSFN but inside these walls, it's out of respect. It would be the same for the public to go into his house and just take all his belongings, which isn't right either! He does have a Facebook page which I won't link here but it's not hard to find, he does have a few friends on there which could possibly be leads to the questions we have.