Cyker

Hahaha! There are more Win98 users than Vista or 7!!

One problem with Windows Server is that some programs will detect that it is a server version and say: "Aha! You can't install/run this software on Windows Server - You must buy the Server Version which is exactly the same but costs 3x as much!" *glares at Symantec and Acronis*

I'm also worried about all the IPv4 hardware (Palms, printers, cameras, NAS' etc.). In theory, it should be possible to NAT from IPv6 <-> IPv4, as we used to use IPX/SPX<->TCP/IP NAT routers in my university (*sniff* I miss IPX!), but IPv6 is such a mess that I think it will be glitchy, like in the old modem days when I used WinGate as a SOCKS proxy to share my modem connection! There is no getting around it - Mass IPv6 deployment will break the 'net right now; Companies aren't thinking about inter-op scenarios atm; They just want to sell you IPv6 gear to replace all your IPv4 gear! That said, I think you can access a lot of things using an IPv6-aware proxy, but there is a lot of stuff that won't work properly over a proxy, and obviously it requires your device/program support using a proxy, which many more obscure things (Which are usually the ones you need...) don't!

Just a heads up for any gameport Sidewinder joystick owners who would love to get their stick working again: Sickone and Grendel over the DescentBB.net 'board have made a converter box that lets you plug it into a USB port while retaining all the digital mode features, which has been impossible on faster computers, computers which have no Gameport and Windows Vista/7. It's about $30 plus delivery (relatively pricey as it uses a Teensy microcontroller; The ATmega was cheaper but you need a chip programmer!), but you do have the option of building it yourself. If you want a pre-made one, Sickone only has 6 left as of today (2010/08/20) as I bought two for me and a friend, but tbh it doesn't look that hard to make (Esp. compared to the ATmega version!) Grendel's DIY thread Sickone's ready-made converter HTH!

@Dave: I have an X850PE which I Flash-hacked into an X850XT that you can try if you want; I was also trying to find a card which would work in Win98 and Win2k that was faster than my old 6600GT, but for some reason it was actually slower in the games I wanted a faster card for (NWN2, Freespace2, Prince of Persia 2008...) That, and I couldn't run a lot of demoscene stuff that previously worked on the 6600GT, so I removed it.

Ooh! You, sir, are a diamond!! I'll have to try that out on my Win2k side...

Yeah, I think that and one other driver are the only ones that actually detect and 'work' properly with the 7950GT. The problem I have is that once you reboot to enable the new driver, things stop working; I can see that the graphics system has been init'd (That's what the message says on the 9200! ), but that's where it stops I might have to install VNC just to see if its just the graphics system that's not working or whether the whole boot process stalls at that point... That driver should work with the 7800, but one good thing about the 7800 is you have more options for drivers with that core (Plus the 'official' driver that I linked to )

Nah, don't worry; The firmware isn't that critical (The card works, unlike the VT6421, so I can't really complain ) My main annoyance is the lack of an unmount ability, but my workaround for that is just to not unplug the drive until I turn the compy off If you really want me to, I can pull the card out of my system to get a suitable highres pic, but otherwise I'm too lazy to (It's quite short and stuck in between my Radeon 9200 and the GF7950GT and I have to take both of them out to get at it! ). The card in question is this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220570641708

I think that's just how the SI drivers work. Is that a bad thing? I never got this "safely remove". It's like technology regression; you didn't have to tell the OS before removing diskettes, now you have to notify it in advance? I think if you just give it a few seconds to write any delayed writes it should be okay. I agree it is a hassle, but actually, it is *ESSENTIAL* to unmount modern journaling filesystems like NTFS. All modern OS have this facility, even Linux (Which actually is even stricter!), and for good reason! You can't treat modern high-speed storage (esp. hard disks!) like you would a floppy disk; Floppy disks didn't use any buffering and didn't do stuff like delayed, out-of-order and batched writes. With hard disks it's especially important as the journal is always active; If you just unplug the drive it will become inconsistent and you risk nasty data corruption. When you run safely remove, it flushes all buffers to disk, syncs up the journal and then closes it properly; If you just yank it out, none of this gets done and at the best case the drive is marked as being uncleanly unmounted and will trigger a chkdsk request next time it's plugged in. Worst case, the buffers are lost and the journal is corrupted and having had this happen to me before, it's not something I intend to risk again! How did you try upgrading and what BIOS version do you have? I think you might still be able to update it. (I also think the BIOS doesn't matter for anything but DOS/int13 access). I tried updating it using the Silicon Image firmware updater which is available in the download area with the actual firmware update. It sees the card but won't flash it because it doesn't have a supported flash chip (Assuming it even has a flash chip; Apparently it's common for cheap ones to be fitted with ROMs). If you have any suggestions I'll listen! The firmware updates don't affect the BIOS hooks much; They're mainly for better support of SATA protocols (Presumably fixing some bugs?). Supposedly there is a speed boost too but I'm not sure if that's just for RAID'd drives or also singles. @dencorso - Yeah; It looks like neither Via nor SI bothered to code hotplug routines into their drivers; It's especially ironic for me because the nVidia drivers for my motherboard's SATA do support it and the internal disk with my Win2k install appears in the Safely Remove dialog! Pity there isn't a card with an nVidia SATA chipset!

I look forward to your results! Heck, if it works, I might get one too! I'd like to know what it's like speed-wise vs the 7950GT too...

Darn I must admit the only times I've used such BIOS editor were to overclock my old Ti4200 and to convert an X850PE to an X850XT I'll have a poke around and get back to you...

@DaveH - I think you can hack the BIOS/firmware with something like NiBiTor to make the card think it only has 256MB RAM... There are lots of stuff you can tweak but can't remember if RAM size is one of them

http://www.bfgtech.com/bfgr78256gsoc.aspx Go there, click Support; should take you to the driver Edit: Or try this: http://www.bfgtech.com/CMDocs/BFGTech/NVIDIADisplayWin9x(82_16)int.zip Options are a bit limited as the 79xx series simply aren't supported in older drivers; It's not just a case of kludging the inf - There just aren't any codepaths for the 79xx chips afaik!

Yeah, the 7800GS should be a safe upgrade, but I don't know how much faster it will be and whether the performance boost is worth it. (If you find a cheap one tho', by all means!! )

The best nVidia supported card for Win98 is the 6800GT However, there is an official driver made by BFG for their custom 7800GS AGP. There are modified drivers that detect the 7x and 8x series cards, and Dave-H successfully got one to work with 7950GT, so there's a good chance the 7900 will work with it. The 79xx GT's are considerably faster than the 6's, but there aren't many games which can take full advantage of the card. It'd be good for dual booting tho'

Niiice! Is it a 512MB one? Got a link so I can be nosy?

Well it's not entirely sorted; I still have a problem with the pad in PoP2008, but at least I can play Sand of Time with it (It's a better game anyway IMHO ) I may try th XBCD drivers, but I remember having problems with them before so I may need to pester you for help

Hey all, I'm currently testing the XBox 360 controller driver from: http://www.katch.ne.jp/~morii/driver/x360c/index.html Does anyone use it here? I'm trying to figure out this annoying problem I'm having with it: For the most part it works well, but there is a strange input where some axis is constantly being read as being pushed. For instance 1) In Prince of Persia - Sands of Time, when I try configure the controls it tries to select everything as Slider1 (+/-) 2) In Prince of Persia 2008, I can configure all the controls fine, BUT, the menu selection keeps going up up; In effect can only navigate the menu using the mouse because if I try and use the keyboard/pad, the selection keeps moving up! Edit: Okay, #1 turned out to be my Sidewinder (Turns out some games *can* read from two different joysticks rather than the one with the highest ID! PoP-SoT was reading the SW3DP's throttle as an input! *facepalm )

I don't mind tangents! (The 'board mods might tho... ) But yeah, my system runs Borderlands at 1024x768 with most everything on except the more intensive things like depth of field and the shadow thingy (Dynamic occlusion or something like that). It actually runs better than both NWN2 and FreeSpace 2 IMHO!! NWN2 is particularly bad, but I think this is mostly down to Bioware's obsession with writing stuff in Visual Basic The game 'pauses' every time a new texture or animation frame occurs and practically dies during any kind of battle! With FreeSpace 2, if you turn everything on and use all the latest MediaVPs it becomes very GPU intensive, and the sheer scale and detail of the ships would make my old 6600GT choke during large space battles. The X850 was better, but because it's only SM2 it would have lost things like normal mapping. One good thing about going to the 7800GS is I might be able to play MechWarrior 3 on it instead of using the 9200SE or my Voodoo2's because it's just too fast and causes all sorts of weird bugginess!

Haha! I didn't realize that was you on the Opera forum! Small world! As for the card, yeeah... bit dodgy that. I think they've mismatched the picture or the description is wrong, and while getting a branded 7950GT would be nice, I wouldn't pay that much for one! I think your original choices are a safer bet! It is hard trying to find older stuff outside of eBay tho'; I scoured the 'net for ages trying to find an PCI eSATA card that didn't use a Via chip, but had to call it quits and eBay it anyway in the end!

If you can find a real XFX card then it'd be worth paying a bit extra for it. The ones we've bought are some kind of typical chinese/taiwanese generic clones and probably won't be as of a high standard... BTW, I double checked and the one I bought was this one: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300364893920 ) It's amazing how many cards that look like that are floating around on eBay! I must admit I'm tempted to flog my one and get something less troublesome (Maybe a 7800GS or 6800GT?), but I don't know how well that would cope with things like NWN2, Freespace 2 SCP and Borderlands...!

Gave up and just bought one on eBay! It's some no-name card based on the Sil 3512 chipset. As usual with these things, there are good and bad points! Good points: It works! I can plug eSATA 2 stuff into it and it successfully negotiates down to 1.5Gbit. Bad points: Safely Remove/Unplug doesn't work (Devices connected don't get recognized as 'ejectable' devices so they never get added to the remove dialog ) Firmware flashing doesn't work! I was going to update the firmware in this, but it turns out the card doesn't have a Flash chip (Or it uses an unsupported flash chip?!) so the BIOS upgrade from Silicon Image don't work! So, buyer beware! Don't get anything that uses a Via VT6421 and if you get a Silicon Image-based card, make sure it has a supported Flash chip!

Had a bit of a scare after I re-imaged my '98 partition and it was still VMM/IOS BSOD'ing, and I ended up having to manually scour the registry and inf etc. directories to eradicate driver for all gfx cards (My old 6600GT, X850 and 9200!) then reinstall just the Radeon to get it to boot again and that seems to have done the trick...! @Dave-H - I think you should be able to get a refund; It's not like you tried to do something weird with the card (Trying to insert a Molex plug the wrong way is actually very difficult! ) TBH, the card is just a no-effort-even-attempted clone of the nVidia reference board, and I bet the QA wasn't great so I'd e more inclined to think it was the card, especially if your card was packed the same way as mine... (Mine was just in a plain box and wrapped in bubblewrap! Seriously... Bubblewrap!? It's only one of the worst things for static buildup!! Wasn't even in a static bag!) To be fair tho', my card has been pretty solid and quite awesome (Albeit not in Win98! ), even in this heat As for a replacement, if you don't mind using eBay there are loads of 7950GTs in Hong Kong! I do wonder whether I should try a 7800GS tho'; I just saw one for about £20 and I know they actually have official Win98 drivers too! @rloew - Another oddity of my Win98 is that hacking MaxPhysPage and MaxFileCache, even to limit RAM to <512MB, still doesn't allow my Win98 to boot with >1GB RAM (This was my main reason for buying patchmem! ) I think I will take your advice and remove the /A tho' (And maybe the /M and the split8mb.exe too...), as I only put them in for testing. (Haven't done it yet mainly due to laziness )

Argh, sorry to hear what happened But at least you got it working for a it!! Inspired by your success, I had another go! Tried removing my Live!, SATA controller and the Radeon from the board and tried to see if I could get it working. Tried several different patchmem options and the split8mb utility, different BIOS tweaks that I had written down before and a bunch of other stuff, but still can't get it to boot. Just hangs at "Starting Windos 98..." or "Please wait while setup updates your system files blah blah Completed updating files, continuing to load Windows..." I had to call it quits again tho' because in my over enthusiasm I have messed up my Win98 install and it just boots into a BSOD in VMM or IOS or just says Windows Protection Error blah blah I wish I had the tracing tools I have in Linux to try and debug this stuff! I think there is something fundamentally weird about something on my system which is stopping it from working but I wouldn't even know where to begin!

Yeah, you'll never get that working in Win98 (Well, unless rloew branches out into custom driver writing ) Hmm... well you'll have to hunt around in your BIOS for an option to keep the onboard graphics enabled when a graphics card is plugged in. If you have an AWARD/Phoenix BIOS, you may need to do CTRL+F1 at the BIOS main menu to unlock any hidden options. If you have an AMI BIOS you're probably out of luck because they suck. Also, check your motherboard manual - If the onboard graphics chip is connected via AGP, give up; You can't have two AGP cards running in the same system so the other one will be forcibly disabled. Your only option in that case is you're going to have to buy a PCI graphics card (S3 Virge (rubbish), Radeon 9200SE PCI (less rubbish) or nVidia 6200 PCI (better) or the my-mate-says-he-saw-one-in-hong-ong rare nVidia 6600 PCI (impossible)) and have a dual-card system like I do. (Hope you got good quality monitor buttons or KVM switch then )