Tommy

I still use Windows 2000 and Windows 98 on a daily basis. I'm in full agreement that new interfaces just plain suck. I hate the new interfaces where things have to be flat and boxy. Even the Google logo had to go from a nice looking depth to just a plain old flat color. BORING! I still use Office 2000 on both my computers, in the exception for Outlook 2003 on my Windows 2000 machine. We have Office 2013 via Citrix at work and I hate it. Not only does Citrix make Office sluggish, but Office itself is just so much harder to use. Word does have some cool new features to it for designers but there's no reason for the new interface. It's terrible and I have a hard time figuring out how to do familiar tasks. I was a whiz in Office, now I almost have to relearn everything. Another thing I hate that it seems everyone loves using is what they call the "hamburger" button for your menu options. Why? Why does three stupid lines represent your menu? Don't get me wrong, I'm not necessarily against change, but I want to see improvements, not back tracking. Not only has Windows gone backwards, but so has web design as a whole. I used to pride myself in webpage designs and layouts and now all you get are generic colors, flat of course, with bulky looking boxes, and I hate tablet optimized websites, those are just plain stupid. I'm looking to start using Linux and learning it. I've used it before but never truly engaged in the learning curve of it. If Microsoft can't get their act together, which I'm sure it never will, and when my computers stop doing what I need them to do, I'm off to Linux land. I really can't believe with all the outrage in these new OSes that they really take feedback seriously. They collect what we think, and then build what they want.

Sounds like people may be forced to start having face to face interactions with each other again. Oh the horror it would be for so many people. Truthfully, I'd just laugh. I grow ever so tired of the smartphone obsession.

So the lovely folks at Microsoft have done it again! Any version of Skype that is older than day old pastries no longer connects to the Skype service. So the patched Skype 5.5 no longer works and trying to sign in brings you that lovely message of how they were so sweet and simply signed you out because your version of Skype is outdated. But never fear! All you have to do is download the latest version and you'll be good to go! That is, of course, until you launch it and find out it doesn't work (obviously!). Their constant excuse is because they want to bring their users a much richer experience with Skype. Well, Skype was working just fine for me and did exactly what I needed it to do. I keep seeing this as a way to bully people into not just updating their software, but their version of Windows as well. It appears the newest supports XP but how long that will be, nobody knows. I'm sure eventually the plug will be pulled on it and unless you have Windows 7 or newer, you'll be SOL. Anyway, I tried accessing the site last night and it was experiencing some sort of technical issue so I wasn't able to check this link out up above to see if blackwingcat has already made some sort of update, but browsing his blog yielding nothing, for me anyway. I would check now but being as I'm at work and limited websites work (his is one that I cannot access here), I'm posting this as a heads up and hopefully a solution can be worked out. Changing the Skype version isn't helping but I'm sure there's something coded in there, probably in hex, that needs to be changed because changing the version number still makes the Skype server see it as version 6.18, even though doing about Skype shows 7.33.0.105.

Short and to the point! Welcome to MSFN!

So I could wear Windows 98 on my wrist now? Sweeet!

Welcome to MSFN! I hope you have a great experience here with us. Just grab a cup of coffee and lounge around!

If Microsoft doesn't change their direction, I have a feeling either people will be forced so heavily onto their new platforms whether they like it or not, or people will switch to entirely different OSs. The reason 7 is still so high in popularity is because many people don't care for 8 or 10. Windows 7 as far as I'm concerned is the last "classic" version of Windows whereas 8 and 10 are hybrids and not everyone is onboard with that. It's clear though that Microsoft is piggy-backing on the success of Apple's Application Store (I refuse to use that shortened "word" =/), but whether it's working out as planned, I don't really know. I guess my question here though is what is really the difference between Wine and KernelEx? I get the vibe that KernelEx for Windows 98/Me is more like Wine (?) that it doesn't actually replace system files whereas KernelEx for Windows 2000 does and therefor modifying the entire hard kernel layer rather than playing off other file dependencies.

@Painkilleraxel Please post in English or at least provide a translation for our other members. Thank you!

Unfortunately, there's not much that can be done without rewriting a lot of code. As Dibya pointed out, it was a leaked beta and even though it's based on Windows 2000, there's still enough differences where even if you installed KernelEx, it would most likely either crash the OS completely or turn it into Windows 2000. KernelEx I believe even replaces ntoskrnl.exe which not only contains the boot splash but a lot of other startup code as well. I totally agree though, it would be cool to do something with it but I don't think there's enough interest in it to actually start patching it to become usable.

Just tried the XP port of Vista's Spider Solitare and it seems to working just fine with 4.5.2016.16 with very few minor graphical glitches which may or may not be related to my testing system. Seems a bit slow but this was tested on a PIII 1GHz Coppermine. Will try the other games soon. Only thing is that when it installs, it installs in the Program Files folder but then creates a new %systemroot%\Program Files folder inside of it so possibly extracting the Microsoft Games folder out of there and placing it within the real Program Files folder and updating your shortcuts should work without a hitch.

As far as your mileage may vary, I've honestly never had any issues running Windows 98 SE with 1gig of RAM without patches. Unless I just don't do some of the things with it that help trigger it to crash, I don't know. With that being said though, if you're truly serious about using Windows 98 in a production environment, I'd completely recommend Rloew's SATA and RAM patches. Not that I'm skeptical of the great Rloew, but I was skeptical of the SATA patch at first because I didn't realize that the SATA control despite also having IDE was causing my problems. But I did bite the bullet and bought it and it worked, it cured my problems. Just those two things can really make your life a lot more simple and less of a headache. The RAM patch I would say is totally ideal, even for less than 1gig of RAM, it can help stabilize the system. But I too use a Windows 98 system daily and those two items have made it possible to have a nearly modern system. As for my systems, I always use add on cards anyway for video and sound, so as long as you have compatible cards, you're good to go. Unless you do some serious high end gaming, mostly any video card from the mid-2000s would suffice quite nicely as long as it has drivers for Windows 98.

Welcome to MSFN! We hope you enjoy your stay here with us.

That's why I try to stay as low profile as possible. Sheeple love the internet of things but never think of the consequences connecting your entire life to the internet can be. The internet isn't foul-proof by any means. Remember, the Titanic was said to be unsinkable. Well, it sunk. Human arrogance can say whatever it wants to, but that doesn't always mean it's the truth. My believing is that any computer or device connected to the internet can get hacked if someone tries hard enough, regardless of how many firewalls and security measures are put into place. It's foolishness to let your guard down and believe you're protected just because it says you are. Think that even if you lock the doors to your own home with several security bolts and that you built your home without windows that there's no way in? I'm sure a semi or tank rammed into it could get in. Nothing is completely infallible.

Welcome to MSFN! We hope you enjoy our community!

I remember about a year ago, I was looking on eBay and found a seller that was selling new Fiamm disc horns, both the high note and low note, for $25,000! Who in their right mind would pay such an absurd amount for some crappy disc horns that you could easily pick up at your local auto store for about $25 which sometimes even includes the relay. But if I remember correctly, it had that these were for a BMW. Well, anyone like me who has experience with car horns knows that almost all horns, especially Fiamm branded horns are pretty well universal and can work on any car as long as it is rated for the correct voltage. Makes me wonder if anyone was stupid enough to pay that price for them.

Welcome! It's great to have you here! I love Windows 98 too but sometimes it gets more and more frustrating to use. But it's always great to see another member here who appreciates fine things

Just to add my two cents in the matter, I too dropped Pale Moon after using it for several years. Actually, 27 Portable works on Windows 2000 with the proper configuration, but it seems to have messed up my Atom XP 26.5 installed version just a bit (and at the time there seems no way to fix it even after reinstalling it). But now I too use FireFox and it does need to be updated since it's on version 50, it's doing a better job since Pale Moon sometimes gave me problems with YouTube.

Welcome to MSFN! I hope you find our community fun and informative!

Welcome to MSFN!! This sounds like quite an interesting project. Even if people have failed to get HD Audio working in the past on Windows 9x, there's no harm in continuing to try to get something to work. This is of course where I draw the line since I'm not a coder by any means. But as Lone above said, if anyone can help point you in the right direction, it'd totally be @rloew. Good luck, and I'm going to be following this thread closely. I totally hope we can have some sort of breakthrough or at least if anything, gain more knowledge on the subject.

I used to use AutoPatcher a long time ago but that's pretty much irrelevant these days. Before Microsoft got after them, I thought it was a pretty dang nice patching utility that I mainly used for Windows XP (and 2000 when I permanently switched back to it). But then MS basically got after them and served them with a cease and desist notice and I don't think their Windows Update fetcher really caught on which for me, before I had the internet at my own house, I loved AP and would download it and stick it on a flashdrive to take home with me. But now we live in the age of contributed projects here on MSFN, which I feel FAR outshine AP. AP was a fine product for its time of course. As for USP3.x, I swear by it and use it on all of my Windows 98 machines. I believe a few people on here don't use it for specific reasons which if they want to chime in on this thread, then they're more than welcome to. But as far as I know, it contains all the main update files that you'll need even if that's the only thing from it that you use. But whenever I install Windows 98, I usually go by installing the OS first, install the main drivers, install USP3.x's main updates, reboot, and then relaunch USP3.x and install any other components that you want, then optionally install KernelEx. One thing to note is that if you use rloew's RAM patch, you'll need to reinstall the patch after you install USP3.x because the files get overwritten and will cause trouble. I always keep the patch on the root C: drive so it's extremely easy from DOS to repatch the system if and when necessary.

Beige tower, I love it!!! Well, I haven't been in the NFS community in quite some time so I can't remember exactly what they've created but I know there are some graphics patches as well as just exe patches to help bypass certain game checks on system requirements which both 98 and XP can take advantage of. And is that a Linksys WUSB54G I see on the top of the tower?

I can't seem to "verify" this either, but it appears it's reported on several other different forums. 60, too young, such a shame.

I think it's a very good theory. I mean lets face it, despite looking almost the same and acting the same, 9x and NT are two completely different beasts from each other with different inter-workings. It's surprising that Windows 2000 can even game these days unlike when it was originally released even though it had the capability for DirectX unlike it's NT4 predecessor, it seems around SP3 and especially SP4 things changed where it would allow more games and whatnot to work on it. In the case of High Stakes, despite a patch being available for it, straight out of the box it HATES NTFS drives and therefor a warning would pop up each time you started the game saying there was 1MB or less drive space and even though it didn't specifically say so, that would mean your game progress would not be saved even if it appears to in the game itself. When you'd go to start it back up, the progress from last time would be lost.

High Stakes wasn't designed for Windows XP, but it *can* be made to run with a little persistence. So I'm thinking even if KernelEx is set to different settings, it's possible that it was somehow interfering with the game and the game just wasn't liking it. Seems to me once I tried running it on XP under the Windows 98 setting and the game itself ran slowly with it. I know in XP switching it between 9x and NT caused different things to happen to the game itself.

I've played High Stakes before, I don't remember having any issues with it like this but I've never tried it on unofficial updates before. Can you try running the game on a vanilla Windows 98 machine and see if it continues happening? Although I don't know about the processor as well. I know Porsche Unleashed, the game after High Stakes has a problem with high speed processors like that and either the graphics look terrible or the game refuses to run at all. Try www.nfscars.net and see if they have any unofficial patches for the game itself, that might help you out. That would be my suggestion as I used to be big in the Need for Speed series. Funny though because NFSIII Hot Pursuit seems to run just fine on a high speed processor but then I don't know if it uses a different engine or not.