pangoomis

Best bet is to use Connectix Virtual PC 5.1.370. You can run Windows 7 on it on Windows 98 SE. (Make sure CPUID limit in BIOS is enabled, apparently this makes it work)

What GPU you have? Forceware 8x.xx and 7x.xx can be VERY buggy on Windows 9x. Try using older drivers and see if issues go away, you can find them here: https://www.philscomputerlab.com/nvidia-9x-graphics-drivers.html

I've made a ZIP copy. Looking forward in your adventures.

I'm afraid bringing any attention to him regarding licensing/legality would end up with him just closing the project on GitHub and/or keeping it all to himself. He hasn't been active since two weeks, we'll see...

@Bruninho I agree with OP that a separate thread would be nice for WineD3D on 98SE. As someone who wants to run GTA IV on Windows 98SE, I am currently stuck at the limitations of the latest available NVIDIA and ATI drivers for 98SE making it impossible to run it so far. NVIDIA drivers don't support the D3DFMT_A32B32G32R32F texture which GTA IV expects, and ATI drivers/cards do not support Shader Model 3.0 which GTA IV expects as well. I've tried SwiftShader and public available WineD3D versions and other 'software renderer' junk to no avail. Having modern/specialized/custom versions of WineD3D for 98SE would open new opportunities for running newer games. He says his $60 donation is 'small'.

@Bruninho I am interested in his project as well. He doesn't seem to provide a way to compile WineD3D libraries in his GitHub page, only Glide and OpenGL? One day I will pay him and see how it looks like. Which would make it the second 98SE related purchase I made after buying rloew's AHCI Driver back when he was still alive. I guess it'll be already compiled and would require some debugging skills to determine what is different comparing to normal WineD3D libraries which I do not have

All these things don't matter because when you boot Win9x installed on USB stick it doesn't use any of the BIOS options regarding hard drives and Win9x uses the 16-bit compatibility mode to access the USB drive. The problem is NOT with the medium or its settings, but with VCACHE.VXD being stuck on something, but we do not know what.

Doesn't hurt to try ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1. Seems like the issue is in the VCACHE.VXD file itself...but we don't know what the issue is with it Didn't encounter this issue myself when I had H110 and B450 motherboards. An interesting experiment would be to remove VCACHE.VXD from VMM32.VXD and see what happens

Try disabling the Efficient-cores in UEFI if possible. Do you have the rloew's RAM Patch installed? Make sure the partition you install Win98 to is at the beginning of the hard drive and less than 137GB to avoid problems regarding partitions. You are the first person I see to try Win98 on the new Intel hybrid platform, brave!

I can only think of putting the HDD in a different machine and see how it behaves.

I've noticed ThrottleStop in the normal log. Have you tried disabling it? I don't see you mentioning it. It shouldn't load in safe mode but maybe it does for whatever reason.

As an owner of a T42p that uses 98SE on it, you can use Windows 98SE T42 drivers on a T42p with no issues at all. The only driver that is missing for full 98SE compatibility is the fingerprint reader. Everything else is supported, including the FireGL graphics card, despite what IBM might tell you otherwise But yes, for 99% of users, T42 is a better choice for 98SE than T42p, mostly because it's more common and therefore cheaper.

Do you have a NVMe drive in the laptop? If so, you would need to have image with NVMe drivers integrated. If it still doesn't work, try different NVMe/AHCI drivers.

Use WinSetupFromUSB.

Have you tried updating the motherboards BIOS to the latest version? Try using the PC outside the case for some time to see if the issue can (hopefully not) occur even without the front panel headers being involved.

https://rloewelectronics.com/

"unofficial" refers to inclusion of non-free binary firmware blobs for some hardware (you would know that if you read the info there), here's the official version (Debian Buster is Debian 10): https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/10.10.0/i386/iso-dvd/ In fact, the latest Debian version (11, bullseye) still has the i386 version as sparty411 points out: https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/i386/iso-dvd/ Official Debian website still prominently shows i386 as one of the available versions: https://www.debian.org/CD/http-ftp/index.en.html Sorry for the off-topic, but dencorso is incorrect regarding Debian and 32-bit version availability.

Umm, but Debian still has a i386/x86 version though? https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/unofficial/non-free/cd-including-firmware/archive/10.10.0+nonfree/i386/iso-dvd/

Newest NVIDIA GPU drivers for 9x do contain the most amount of bugs in games (and not only games, say hello to the broken uninstaller ). Definitely try earlier versions. As for the performance decrease, from what I know, it doesn't apply much to the 6 and 7 series. Mostly because there's no earlier driver versions to compare with so don't have to worry about that. The 6 and 7 series GPUs are much more powerful than FX and older series so even if drivers were to decrease performance, it wouldn't be so noticeable in day-to-day gaming.

WineD3D does not work on 98SE/ME, believe me I've tried Haven't tried Mesa3D but I don't have high hopes for it either, considering that OpenGL on 98SE/ME is limited to version 2.0 using NVIDIA drivers and 1.5 using ATI drivers further complicating things. Just because you can drop a DLL of the same name to emulate new things, doesn't mean it will work on 98SE/ME. Depending on games you want to play and luck, SwiftShader might be the only thing working on 98SE/ME for you, at least its demo apps worked on 98SE/ME from what I've tested.

Extract COMCTL32.DLL from setup CAB files are replace the existing one in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM folder. Or, just install the English version of ActiveSync.

That's a second WiFi card you've tried that should work in 98SE (there are drivers for them for 98SE), yet it doesn't for you. I am feeling this might be laptop's fault and not 98SE. It would be great if you could test those WiFi card on a different laptop with a MiniPCI slot, this way we could check if it's the laptop fault, or the cards fault. If you're looking for a laptop with good 98SE compatibility, look for an Intel 855 chipset.

Best option would be to buy a GeForce 6200/6600/6800 or 7000 series PCI-E GPU, or a Radeon X300/X550/X600/X1050 (slow), X700/X800/X850 (fast) PCI-E GPU, and use Linux together with QEMU passthrough like someone did here: https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=72401 If you are looking for a way without buying anything? Sorry, but that's not possible. If I knew a way to virtualize/emulate a decent GPU for 98SE, I would have know it by now. That would have saved me from spending money on building a powerful 98SE PC. I know my game.

This ThinkPad is too new for 98SE, forget about it. The newest ThinkPads compatible with 98SE are the T42/T42p/R51, and similar ones with Intel 855 chipset. Basically most ThinkPads first released in 2004 or earlier, not after.

https://archive.org/details/PATCHMEM ?