Cyker

I had tried changing the font, even to Arial Unicode MS (which usually covers everything!), but to no avail - All have the Unknown Character Squares of Doom. I did what you said anyway, and curiously it says the missing font is "SanSerif" ?!? I don't know if that is an actual font or just a generic name for an unknown sans-serif font; I've not seen a font literally called that before... I did find that the default substitution is to "Symbol", which is why the characters are appearing as greek alphabet instead of latin, but it's bizarre that that is the only font where any characters are being displayed; All others just display the square boxes! Another interesting thing is any font which has a 'script' of Symbol (As opposed to OEM, Western, Cyrillic etc.; Word >97 won't let you pick that any more, but you can see it in Notepad or Wordpad when you select font preferences) WILL display some characters - For instance I have a bitmap font called WST_ENGL which *does* display the text correctly, but as soon as I switch away it's back to the boxes. I have also found I can load it into Wordpad, change the font for Arial or something and the text is now readable! However that buggers up all the formatting and pictures and I'm still no closer to understanding why I can't open the document in Word 2003 or LibreOffice...!

Hi all, As per the title, have a bizarre problem with a Word document. The images explain the problem better than I can, but in short we have a .DOC which works just fine on the original author's computer but when loaded into anyone elses (I've tried mine, my place of work, friends) it replaces most of the characters with the equivalent letter from the greek alphabet, and if I try to open it in Open/Libre Office I just get the Unknown Character Squares of Doom. The original author has tried saving it as an RTF and we *still* get the same problem - Oddly I can open the RTF in Notepad and find the original english text, but when loaded into Word or LibreOffice I get the greek characters or squares! It's seems like some kind of freaky character set encoding issue, but I don't know how to fix it. I've tried a few things: Setting the Language from Tools -> Language -> Set Language does nothing at all, Setting the Confirm Encoding option in Tools -> Options -> General doesn't do anything for the .DOC and just spits out the raw text of the .RTF instead of the formatted text. Changing fonts in LibreOffice does nothing, and in Word it changes all the text from the (literally!) greek'd characters to Unknown Character Squares of Doom! Seriously, does anyone have any ideas?! I've never come across such weird problems since my Windows 3.1 days (Where you HAD to specify character sets and encoding for non-english text!) I bet it's something stupidly trivial too...!

I'd say if you only have even a little more than 1GB RAM, get rloew's patch. If you have 1GB RAM or less, see if you can get things working with the basic tweaks (ini tweaks etc.). I was running on 1GB RAM for years with just the ini tweaks and never had any problems. It does seem to be dependent on chipsets somewhat; nForce3 people have had a lot more luck running up to a gig whereas other chipsets seem to have trouble at 512MB. (On the downside tho', it seems nForce 3 chipsets are incapable of using graphics cards with 512MB RAM in 9x!) If the ini tweaks doesn't work or you have more than 1GB RAM, patchmem is the easiest way to get it working by far.

I don't think he wanted any kermit/zmodem etc.encoded transfers, just a raw filedump which, indeed, Hypertermial can't do. I *believe* that the newer version of Hyperterminal (Assuming you can still download it at Hilgraeve's website) allows you to turn off unix/dos text conversion but it's been a long time since I used it. I only ever used it for dial-up BBS'!!

Well it's possible as H264 has been released royalty free for web use, and if we're lucky WebM will become prolific enough that all browsers will need to support it But that's not the main thing I mean; Flash started life as a vector graphics animator, but has grown quite a lot from there. With javascript and svg you can already do a lot of Flash-like stuff, and newer browsers which support things like Canvas tags are getting closer and closer to modern Flash-levels of functionality...

It's a cunning ploy; I'm 2-parts relieved, 1-part applauding and and 1-part annoyed. If they'd waited for April Fools day it would have gone down better!

Hrm, it would seem it is just a marketing stunt for their transition from beta to release. I am not amused.

Personally I hope it dies off; We need less proprietary content plugins, not more! It's basically an attempt to take on Flash, but it's just stupid - being forced to install Flash to be able to access large parts of the web is bad enough, but I'll be damned if I help another proprietary content system get a foot hold. Why force everyone to install two plugins that do the exact same thing anyway?! (Personally, I hope HTML5 kills off both of them...)

Good Old Games, the last source for mainstream retro games without DRM that doesn't suck, has closed its doors! Why?!? Whyyyy?!?! :'(

Software solutions: 1) Turn on Remote Desktop on the crap machine and then you can remote desktop into it 2) If you will be having a sep. monitor for both tho', install Synergy - http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ It lets you transition between both machines just by moving the mouse across the screen from one to the other. It's a bit like having a multi-monitor setup, but spread across more than one machine. Totally badass

TBH, the stock gameport driver should work with any gameport; As long as the hardware gets assigned an address properly, all the driver has to do is read from that location. Use the XP drivers for the card, but you can try manually installing the gameport driver, or forcing it to use the 2K driver for the gameport only? Failing that, there is always the option of getting a gameport-usb adaptor. What stick is it BTW, a Sidewinder 3D Pro or a Precision Pro? I recently bought a convertor for my 3D Pro so that I can use it in digital mode (Modern machines are too fast for that to work over a gameport, so the stick will go back into analogue mode)

I just tried importing that into my Win2k's registry and it works, quotes around the paths as expected. Not sure why the quotes are disappearing on yours...

Ironically, Win98 is actually a better fileserver than XP or Win2K; They both have limits on the number of open network files (Something stupid like 5 IIRC) whereas Win98 doesn't. Also, Win98 uses Share level security and not User level security, which is less secure but much easier to access for random machines. User level security REQUIRES a user account to access. I think WinXP has a kludge called guest-mode share to let anonymous machines access shares without 'proper' authentication, but it is very hit and miss. Simple filesharing has to be used to make it work.

It does seem chipset/driver specific; Dave's computer uses a server motherboard and an Intel chipset, and Intel boards tend to be the most stable/compatible. nVidia have always played fast and loose with standards if it'd get them a bit of extra speed (I still have fond memories of my smoking TNT1 and AGP slot ) and that's probably what's tripping us up here (Given the number of workarounds the Linux kernel enables when it detects an nForce chipset I shouldn't be too surprised! )

I have the same mobo chipset and have been unable to get my 7950 to work in '98 either. I was trying to find a way of limiting the RAM on the 7950 to 256 but short of de-soldering the RAM chips I haven't found a way of doing it yet

Any USB mouse will work, just the buttons will be the problem. I had a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical (White top, red bottom, 5 buttons and wheel) and was using it happily. A friend lent me an MS Laser Gaming Mouse 6000 which the last Win98 driver didn't work with, but I found I could just pick my old mouse to set the functions for buttons 4 and 5 still Also, there are a few universal mouse utils floating around which are specifically written for configuring extra buttons and axis' which may work.

Does it actually say what it has a conflict with? Maybe it's worth posting a screen grab?

Thanks for the reply rloew We managed to fix it from the other direction in the end; Because the controller uses a Teensy 2.0, Grendel over at descentbb.net was able to modify his firmware code to work around Win98's limit. I just uploaded the new code to the Teensy and it works! Right, I think I'm going to have a few games of MechWarrior 3 the way it was meant to be! (Without the disappearing turrets and bouncing APCs that you get if you run it in 2K or XP! )

Here's a nice obscure query My Sidewinder to USB converter arrived today, and works brilliantly in Win2k, XP, and Linux, but not in 98! As far as I can tell, the problem seems to be this: The converter produces raw values from -512 to 512, but Windows '98 doesn't seem to support negative numbers and caps the interpreted values at 0,0 until the axis in question goes past the half-way mark, at which point it outputs sane values again right up to 65535,65535 (Bottom Right). Does anyone know if there were ever any updated joystick drivers for Win98 (I'm assuming that's VJOYD.VXD (Mine is v4.08.01.0881), JOYHID.VXD (4.88.01.0881) and MSJSTICK.DRV (v4.08.01.0881)) that didn't have this limitation? All the other OS' auto-calibrate on the given raw values and it seems silly that '98 can't, especially since the interpreted values can range from -65535 to +65535!

You mean by limiting the RAM size '98 sees using the ini files? That doesn't always seem to work - I tried it on mine but the system still crashed on boot. The only way I could get it to boot with >1GB was with the patch...

I thought it was just detected as a normal USB HID device, in which case the Win98 drivers should take care of it? You might also be able to build/buy a converter dongle for better compatibility (See the forums at descentbb.net)

It is possible to turn a Linux machine into a router, but AFAIK there is nothing in Linux for doing IPv4 <-> IPv6 NAT I think you can use something like Squid to proxy web requests from an IPv4 interface to an IPv6 interface, but that's only really for http web stuff.

Nice The 6800 is slower than the X850 in raw fillrate, but as soon as shaders come into it the 6800 can take the X850. The only problem with the 6800 is if you use the latest driver, you get this stupid stupid bug where Win98 won't shut down properly, but downgrading to an older one (77.?? I think; Someone else will know! ) fixes that and you don't really loose anything. The X850 was a nice card apart from the lack of SM3 tho'. I sent mine to DaveH, but it arrived DoA He's trying to get it to work still I think, but it's not looking good

I think the only known fix that *actually works* is rloew's patch, but certainly up to 1GB is possible on most ('tho not all!) systems with the above ini tweaks.