98SE

No don't say that. It's getting better all the time. Maybe in 1990s it was terrible. Now we have Rosetta Stone and real time smartphone translators. It will be a matter of time when we have the equivalent of a Star Trek universal translator where it will be automatic. Jaclaz uses some esoteric words now and then mixed with standard colloquial. Usually translators give you these odd words.

Mars Bar? Hmmm... I never thought it to be that special here. Maybe one day when Elon Musk takes us to Mars these will start selling like hotcakes. Freddo vs Mars Index... which will succeed in the future you think? Snicker's seems to be more favored over Mars Bars I thought for a candy bar. I barely see any Mars Bar commercials. But the King sized Snicker's can cost close to $2. Only the McDonald's Dollar Menu used to sell hamburgers (usually no ham in these) so they just call them burgers as low as $1 a few years back then the price jumped back up to almost $2. McChicken and McDouble and Value Fries for $3 plus tax. No more Arch Deluxe. Not sure if I ever had a McPizza or a McLobster but they are very McFly. http://www.ranker.com/list/discontinued-mcdonalds-menu-items/molly-gander

Hmmm interesting choice of word "otiose". Jaclaz do you use a translator to convert to English or is this your normal English speaking style? Very soon we might have a Limitation Patch to International Hamburger Exchange Rate. I say to be fair Carl's Junior / Hardee's 6 Dollar Burger is the average big burger in the U.S. Maybe the organic beef version cost $8. Any other good burger prices globally in your areas fellow MSFN? This will solve Dencorso's interest plus make me hungry. I already donated 3 very good big burgers for the Limitation Patch so I felt maybe Dencorso got a big discount when he said in an earlier statement I thought he was hinting he only paid for the cost of one hamburger.

Original site for XP driver only is down. Found a backup link. Maybe some way to extract from executable just the driver files to inspect INF and transfer IDs to 98 INF. https://web.archive.org/web/20160305175037/http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/software/drivers/wintv-hvr-1600_driver_1_62_28243.exe Good find jaclaz, not sure if WinTV-HVR-1600 can be added to work but here are the 98 INF supported IDs from PVR 250/350. I still recommend to use WinTV-HVR-1600 with XP instead of 9X/ME. It uses around 200MB when WinTV is started and memory usage climbs up. Maybe a proper 9X/ME beta driver might exist near product launch. . . HCWPVRP2.inf ;--------------------------------------------------------------- ; Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II ;--------------------------------------------------------------- [Hauppauge] %p2.DeviceEncode% =p2.Dev15, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0803&SUBSYS_40010070 %p2.DeviceEncodeDecode% =p2.Dev15_VO, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0803&SUBSYS_40000070 %p2.DeviceEncode16% =p2.Dev16, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_40010070 %p2.DeviceEncode16% =p2.Dev16_NH, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_40090070 %p2.DeviceEncode% =p2.Dev15, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0803&SUBSYS_48010070 %p2.DeviceEncodeDecode% =p2.Dev15_VO, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0803&SUBSYS_48000070 %p2.DeviceEncode16% =p2.Dev16, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_48010070 %p2.DeviceEncode16% =p2.Dev16_NH, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_48090070 . . HCWPP2.inf ;--------------------------------------------------------------- ; Hauppauge WinTV-PVR PCI II ;--------------------------------------------------------------- [Hauppauge] ;; Amity2 Retail %A2.DeviceAmity2%=Amity2_Std, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_80030070 ;; Amity2 OEM %A2.DeviceAmity2%=Amity2_Std, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_88010070 ;%A2.DeviceAmity2%=Amity2_Std, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_88030070 ;; AmityDT %A2.DeviceAmity22_1%=Amity22_1, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_E8070070 %A2.DeviceAmity22_2%=Amity22_2, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_E8170070 ;; Baldwin2 OEM %A2.DeviceBaldwin2%=Baldwin2_Std, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016&SUBSYS_C8010070 ;; Unsupported Hardware ;%A2.DeviceAmityUnsupported%=Amity2_Std, PCI\VEN_4444&DEV_0016

Still no official downloadable 98 drivers. You'll need to find one with the original CD on eBay. A lot of these get junked. PVR250-350 would be useless today due to DTV transition. Do you see any other models with downloadable 98 drivers?

Jaclaz your signature has a bunch of empty space lines you can remove 5 or 6 empty lines to save space in your messages. The Grub was the oldest one that dealt with DOS I could find in a tutorial. You have a better one for DOS 6.22/9X/ME/2K/XP with Grub4DOS? If it's not a Linux Ramdisk then where is the XP ISO stored? There is no XP Ramdisk outside of XP is there for a PE? I thought the whole point of that was to have XP running inside a Ramdrive with a Linux bootloader. Once in XP you would use an XP inbox Ramdisk program to access the remaining memory. Are you talking about the sizes of the bootloader? I call the bootloader the program which lets you choose the OS. If you haven't tried a 9X/ME/2K/XP/Vista/W7/W8/W8.1/W10 bootloader then you won't know what I mean. I used a DOS imager of the primary boot partition. To break it down these are the major Windows Bootloaders. You're going to need an actual DOS imager or a program that can do it in Linux that images and restores the image successfully. These are MBR based. I double checked and the smallest is 98SE DOS at 316KB. 9X and XP 686KB <--- Why DOS/9X/ME/2K/XP bootloader is efficient Vista/W7 16MB <--- Bloat occurs W8/8.1/W10 22MB <--- Continued Bloat trend with new GUI interface . The Windows 8 and 10 Boot Loaders are bloated and add a GUI and a front end that takes some time to load. The best one is 98SE/XP bootloader. Vista/W7 requires BCD which can't be edited easily in DOS like Boot.Ini. Windows Boot floppy for 2K/XP/Vista/W7/W8/W8.1.W10 I'd like to see. Or are talking about using Grub4DOS? That doesn't contain the entire bootloader it just does the redirecting. It becomes the primary bootloader then points to the Windows bootloader. Try separating the partitions out. Use a 2GB Primary Partition and then once you've installed Grub4DOS try installing 9X, image that boot partition and see how large it is. Do the same after adding each of these OS one at a time 2K, XP, Vista, W7, W8, W8.1, W10. Check the size of the image after imaging the primary boot partition. They should be similar in size. Don't install the OS to the same boot partition. Create a new partition for each OS. This will isolate the Windows bootloader to the Primary partition separating it from the OS files.

Where are you seeing the 9X driver for the 250 and 350? On this link it's only showing XP and up. http://www.hauppauge.com/site/support/support_pvr250-350.html Latest WinTV-PVR-250/350 installation CD The WinTV-PVR-250 and WinTV-PVR-350 are only supported under 32-bit versions of Windows. Installation note: A valid WinTV application CDROM will be needed to install this WinTV v6 version. Any WinTV-NOVA version 4x, WinTV-PVR, WinTV version 6 or WinTV v7 application CD can be used during the install. If you do not have your original WinTV CD-ROM but would like to update to this WinTV v6 version, you can purchase a new CD on the Hauppauge webstore. WinTV version 6 plus WinTV-PVR drivers. Installation CD Version 4.6b Note: This is a single file which includes the driver, the driver update, middleware, video decoder and WinTV v6 applications and all accessories. This file is larger than the individual pieces, but should be easier to install since it is in one file. Note: this package is for Windows XP, Windows XP Media Center Edition, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Network cards do exist for PCIe with 98 support. Look for Realtek. As for PCIe with USB 2.0 drivers for 98 that I don't believe exists which is needed on Z170 and later where PCI slots are usually missing.

So the 1st GB are we talking 1byte to 1024MB? or 1GB to 2GB? That seems to be an inherent limitation. Did you mention this on your website? What is the reason you chose not to support Pre Pentium when plenty of other 32-bit Ramdisks will function on 386 all the way to Z170 in pure DOS. Some even used conventional memory or possibly the 384KB HMA for 286 and 8088. Also you didn't mention which AMD CPUs worked and where the cut off point is. There might be some AMD users who would be upset if their AMD 386 and 486 CPU didn't work with your 32-bit Non-XMS Ramdisk. Even the Uberto Ramdisk seems to access 2GB max. I suppose if this is true and you mentioned 98SE uses 1.1GB and ME 1.9GB then the Uberto Ramdisk would have a similar performance to your 32-bit Non-XMS Ramdisk except it could also operate on non PSE CPUs down to 386 according to the website. Have you tested overlapping compatibility between other DOS Ramdisks since yours doesn't seem to have conventional memory Ramdisk or HMA Ramdisk support. http://www.geocities.ws/politalk/rmdrv/index.html 640KB conventional 384KB HMA up to 1.1 GB 98SE but optimal is 512MB 2.0 GB Uberto Ramdisk 1.0 GB max MMIO space, 256MB for 256MB graphics card . On a 4GB system: 1024MB DOS and some 9X/ME usage, 512MB forced 98SE compatibility limit, 2048MB for Ramdrive, 256MB MMIO space 3840MB total for a 256MB Video card system this would just leave a waste of 256MB at most but compatibility should be nearly the same. . That's why I'm recommending if your 32-bit Non XMS Ramdisk is nearly identical except less CPU support due to PSE restriction then it should be updated to compete on all fronts. Add the option to uninstall the Ramdrive at the command line you already make your Ramdrive appear more versatile once those two areas are fixed. Tweak the additional drive letter conventional memory consumption by daisy chaining off the first drive letter or refine the code so you only use 3KB and subsequent drive letters would use a fraction of that amount or is using HMA or > 3.2GB to store some of those original conventional memory usage. This is more your area of expertise and maybe it is possible to accomplish. If you or someone else did this it would probably be the best DOS based Ramdisk or even 9X/ME at the 32-bit level. Even most standard DOS programs aside from TSRs tend to allow the ability to uninstall from memory. In your case any drive letters created would still persist but even refreshing the memory tables would not require a huge payload to rewrite or add. Nor would it require 700 McRib sandwiches worth of coding. The last thing I want is for you to die from obesity eating all those. You gotta stay on a lean and healthy diet if you want to remain the last few dozen to keep these old school utilities working on modern computers. The best way for you to sell more is to lower the price of your hot sellers. The Memory Limitation Patch would probably sell better at $5 even or $4+$1 handling fee. This would at least get your patch onto as many 9X/ME systems as possible giving your other patches more interest. No one will buy the other patches which only would be required for really modern systems. 9X/ME is dying and we both know it. Z170 already has proven some major hardware compatibility issues and you also know the xHCI ports are now standardized to kill of eHCI which only 9X/ME can understand. As more and more systems are unable to make use of 9X/ME for gaming purposes it is just a slow death for your products which you don't want to happen. To stay relevant the xHCI driver is going to be a priority assuming it can be done. The lowering of the price of your own Limitation Patch would encourage an influx of more users even with those restrictions and that would actually be the cost of a decent burger. The idea of creating a virtual video card emulator would extend support to your product line. The user would have to at least own the physical card and dump the ROMs. Since PCI slots are being phased out a sound card emulator for EAX Advanced would be next but I think DOSBOX code might be able to simplify that portion rather than starting from scratch. I still think you should look into a LS-120 / LS-240 emulation driver for 9X/ME. Maybe your Ramdrive could emulate a LS-120/240 so 9X/ME could install onto it increasing its usefulness. Even though the physical drives are harder to come by but I had grabbed a few of these before they were discontinued thinking this standard would replace 1.44MB/2.88MB. I did recall doing one test of installing Windows 95 onto it and I think it worked but it's so long ago I could be wrong. If you modified this driver maybe there is possibility to use it as part of a USB bootable work around to install 9X/ME into your Dual Mode RamDrive. Given the current situation of Z170 and later with AHCI this might be a better option. MS-DOS 7 can see a 2TB drive (recognize) but doing Pure DOS file copy/moving operations is another problem. What other issues? Such as? I already told you to try doing a simple DIR /S test on even anything 500GB or larger under 98SE DOS and you will see garbage characters eventually pop up before reaching the end of the drive. Make sure you fill the drive to near capacity with tens of thousands of long file names, directories, and subdirectories. Even one of my 2TB FAT32 external hard drives full of videos already demonstrates this bug so anything even at 4TB using patching tricks would cause the same issue. In Win9X/ME maybe it will read your 4TB drive correctly with VFAT but I'm talking specifically about 98SE DOS and one large FAT32 partition. What happens when you hook the 4TB to another standard 98SE computer at a friend's house? 2TB is the safest compatible FAT32 limit. Even if you tried tricking it and made 1 Partition at 2.19999XTB and the remaining space the extended partition you might be able to get away with it. Then you have to deal with what if Windows Disk Management or some 3rd Party Partition Manager was used afterwards and you didn't back up your data before using it and accidentally deleted the partition. I'm not sure how you could recover the data safely since it's using abnormal partitions since most recovery programs might not understand your tweaked 4TB partition or worst case only see the first 2.2TB. I don't see why any customer would have to prove anything like that and the file directory is a clear visual offered that only a person who received an authentic program would have the exact bytes and filenames match up with your copy and I'm not even sure why you even care which customer I am of the hundreds or maybe thousands of others using your programs. I haven't seen any messages to other users on MSFN requesting this before or a MSFN requirement when I joined. Perhaps you didn't consider you have other customers who just buy something and prefer to remain anonymous afterwards. It's like going through a drive through and you pay for your item and you drive out. There's no real follow up or a store manager coming outside and asking for your identity cause you are eating one of their burgers parked outside. Most pirates wouldn't even talk to you if you think about it nor would they go about advertising and promoting your product on other forums. That's like some car thief that stole your car and then the next morning driving back to your home to ringing your door bell to say hello and handing you and your neighbors fliers of your stolen car for sale. No thief would do that and it would be illogical and they'd probably stay away and never return. You already got my most expensive burger donation or I should say at least 3 very good burger donations or 7 McRibs when available is a more realistic cost. All I know is I fed you and that's all I need to care about and my conscience is clear. If you think every person on MSFN who you don't know their name is a thief that would not be a good way to go about treating their users. I think if you made your own forums on your website you would get more users and know their exact names if that was your original goal when selling your products and I don't see why you didn't start forums on your own website as it would encourage more user interest in your products instead of having to go onto another website forum. It may also backfire. I'm sure most people on the internet prefer anonymity in general otherwise they would be on Facebook and Twitter and you would be selling there instead. Do you have these social media accounts? MSFN is an independent website from your own so I don't see why you expected any MSFN user would openly want their identity revealed whether they used your program or not. And like I said before unless I got to know you on a more personal level or met you physically or was helping you maintain your source code or something of that nature so it didn't end up in digital obsolescence would you even know that kind of personal information. It's like if you were a leather jacket seller and we were on some clothing forum and you found out I bought one of your jackets and wanted to my name out of the blue. Now if you were Oprah and I thought maybe you were going to surprise me with a car I think most people would probably not volunteer that information. They paid for the jacket and they wore it and that's all they would care about and at most maybe a thank you for making a wonderful jacket and feedback to improve it. Perhaps you could convince them to send a picture of their jacket if they wanted to show proof they owned it but they would just post that pic on the clothing forum but not send you a direct email attachment unless they knew you pretty well I would think.

Jaclaz they only show up like once a year but last few years no show. Try 40 McRib Fest... License to Gorge. Any McRib in your country?

@ricardrosen Did you boot to 98SE DOS using a USB floppy or optical disc? What program are you using in DOS to test the memory and disk for corruption? At the DOS Prompt switch to the drive letter of your 4TB hard drive. Enter this command and hit enter: DIR/S See if it starts showing any garbage characters before it finishes reading all the files and directories on the entire drive. How full is the 4TB and how much space is remaining? You can also do a CHKDSK after to see storage information. What are your computer system specs? Motherboard and how are you hooking up the 4TB hard drive? Internal SATA or external USB?

I wouldn't use that card directly in my system. I thought if the card itself could be dumped and video card emulated somehow you could then create two of these working in a virtual Quad-SLI which would blow away the GTX 7900 model without the overhead heat and wattage. I've been studying the older 98 drivers and from what I can tell the x800 might work and there's a small chance the x1550 could work as well if they are close enough in generation. I personally hate the heat these cards made and the fan noise so that would be a bonus using an X1XXX on 98SE. Any comparisons between GTX 7900 vs top end X1XXX? Assuming both of these are the best modified cards for 98SE.

I'll see what I can do. I am going to test out the X800 first and then if it works in the Z77 I will try to modify the drivers and test on the X1550 I have. But I also have a 8500GT that I planned to use for a hackintosh test so I could try and see if 98SE works or not. I examined the code difference for 2000 and XP. So at worst I could experiment back porting some of the XP only drivers to 2K for testing on some of these older ones if 98SE can't use it.

The most a big burger would cost might be $6-$8 range so 3 of those $6 dollar burgers still more then the cost a single burger in another country I would think. Where have you seen $20+ for a single burger outside the US? Plus who doesn't love 3 good burgers or a decade old Patch? If the Patch cost reduced to $8-$10 you could skew the statement to be more accurate maybe in a restaurant. But the McRibs are harder to find which makes them special.

I don't recall ever using this newer model on 98SE. I think this model did not support it. The older analog ones worked but used Win TV 2000. Real old software and probably no digital channels so most of the 98SE compliant ones would be dead today for OTA or Cable TV use thanks to the DTV transition around 2009. You could still use those older cards to capture analog footage from a VCR on 98SE.

That is the PCI model. I have the same one in one of my systems. Single tuner. If your computer only has PCI slots I would consider using XP for this one. It's pretty reliable but look for the WinTV 7 disc that came with it. Don't upgrade to 7.2, 8 or higher. They also have a Dual Tuner model for PCIe for XP. If you need the Quad Tuner model you will need to use Windows 7 but this model will lack external video capturing.

BlackWingCat did you ever create a SATA AHCI driver for Windows 2000 unmodified standard version?

I downloaded those SPs ages ago. It's a bummer that Microsoft likes to purge these files to kill support for no reason. Even the XP SPs are gone but as long as you got the original filename you can still search for them and take a chance. I don't know if that Way Back Machine had archived it or not.

The Grub Floppy process takes more steps. But I found a good tutorial for those to use it with Legacy OS. It's best for Windows, Linux, and MAC OS X bootloader if you prefer Linux style. http://clubweb.interbaun.com/~mward/grub.html#use DOS/9X/ME/2K/XP/Vista/W7/W10 bootloader will be around 22MB and no problems when choosing any OS. The DOS/9X/ME/2K/XP bootloader is much smaller I think around 2MB and can be modified all under DOS with just Edit after Attrib you can do pretty much anything necessary. Keep the shades on maybe you will be the first. Only problem I can think of is after storing the XP image onto Ramdisk using that Linux Ramdisk will the Windows Ramdisk software in XP be able to use the rest of your memory or not? http://reboot.pro/topic/9830-universal-hdd-image-files-for-xp-and-windows-7/ http://reboot.pro/topic/20253-windows-xp-64-booting-into-ramdisk/page-3 http://reboot.pro/topic/13005-real-xp-sp3-booting-from-dvd-into-ramdisk/ 98SE

Which DOS are you talking about IBM PC DOS 7.0 or Windows 95/95A MS-DOS 7.0? I already know DOS can handle 2TB drives but using them directly in DOS to do file copy operations I would advise to refrain. It might be safe when you don't have too many files or an empty drive but if you load the drive up you might encounter the bug I'm talking about. I have confirmed that 98SE DOS aka MS-DOS 7.10 has issues reading the entire drive under DOS using the DIR /S to list all the long file names, directories, subdirectories. Eventually before it completes listing everything you will start encountering the garbage characters and what looks like a corrupted FAT. The drive itself should still be good but I would not risk or attempt copying long files names to it or moving them around. Also due to the way the directory listing appears corrupted you would have a hard time getting around in DOS or entering directories or knowing the filenames to copy so navigating such a drive in DOS would be a nightmare. I have tested this in 98SE DOS on 2TB FAT32 years ago loaded full HD recordings with long file names that had to be 4GB or smaller max which meant having to stop the recording every 30 minutes to stay under this limit. I tested smaller capacities of 1TB and 500 GB and they also had the same issue. 320GB I believe it did still have the issue but I would have to reverify. 250GB I think might be on the cusp and work fine but I would have to recheck to confirm. But the 120GB/128GB should be able to fully list without any problems but I might do another test to reconfirm that since I usually don't have my boot drives completely filled and it could be that completely filling the drive the problem will appear as more long file names, directories, and subdirectories are the cause.

Anyhow I'm working on that now by trying a 3rd party USB card to see if the onboard USB ports were just not friendly with 98SE. That was one reason I had stopped playing around on the 98SE Z77. However the serial mouse worked fine on it via COM Port 1. Again this 98SE test was on a Z77 spare system not my main system so this memory is for compatibility. I wanted to have a completely fanless Windows 98SE system running on modern hardware. The P4 seems to require better cooling so I'm putting that one on hold for now. One reason I originally stopped using the P4 was the loud fan noise from the CPU, Power Supply, and IDE 3.5" hard drives and it was getting too slow over time running off one core. As for large capacity drives over 137GB or 128GB actual I do use hard drives on other systems up to 8TB or 17.6TB when they become available in a few years. Once I establish 98SE functionality on the modern system I will try tweaking it to see how much more RAM can be installed although I'm "aware" of your patch as I purchased it as a backup plan I wanted to see what other possibilities exist as well in my upcoming compatibility tests. But as we have both discussed even your Limitation Patch has limits for 98SE in the lower 1GB range. Only WinME has the higher threshold of almost 2GB. The biggest question is how the 512MB vs Patched Limit affects programs in combination with various video and sound cards. This will part of my Z77 98SE compatibility testing process. Which Patch are you referring to here? I know there was a Patch to restore the Pure DOS functionality in Win ME. Thanks for keeping good customer ethics. I hope to see the newly Dual Mode Ramdisk available as the single replacement phasing out the 32-Bit and 64-Bit individual version. Or even better to just include all three in case someone wishes to any of the three on various test systems. I myself would prefer testing and using all three versions in different scenarios as I have a multitude of computers dating back to the late 70s so I would be able to check compatibility and narrow it down. I wanted to confirm this was what you are referring to regarding PSE? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSE-36 PSE-36 (36-bit Page Size Extension) refers to a feature of x86 processors that extends the physical memory addressing capabilities from 32 bits to 36 bits, allowing addressing to up to 64 GB of memory. Digging further I think I found a link to possibly where the first CPU for Intel could support PSE-36. https://books.google.com/books?id=MLJClvCYh34C&pg=PA439#v=onepage&q&f=false The Pentium 1. This may indicate your DOS Ramdisk program might not function on 486 or earlier systems? I have no idea what older systems you have on the Intel side as you stated you only had AMD systems plus the Z87 Intel one. Since you own primarily AMD systems where is the the cut off point on AMD CPUs where the program compatibility breaks for your DOS Ramdisk? If you did create a legacy DOS Ramdisk that didn't require PSE-36 support what is the maximum Ramdisk size that could be achieved? Also assuming if the PSE limitation is due to your HIMEMEX could an alternate Memory Manager like JEMM be used in conjunction with a DOS Ramdisk program written by you to achieve a higher capacity Ramdisk size or would it still require you to write a superior NON PSE CPU DOS Memory Manager and its own DOS Ramdisk to use it making a fourth variant? Since it can't be removed then I suggest leaving those drive letters that were created in the System Tables. When you recreate new Ramdrives you can reuse those letters again as they will only designate or point to the newly created Ramdrive starting from the 4GB start region. Even in DOS for FDISK a deleted partition letter will still remain until you reboot so I guess this would follow common system behavior. So if it can't be undone and the drive letter can still be reserved to be reassigned to a new Ramdrive without rebooting then this is still preferable. My reasons for the de/reallocating is still a theoretical benchmark test I'm pondering and working on making concrete and without actually testing the program in front of me to it refine it is hard to put into words as it is still in flux. It would probably test the limits of your Ramdisk and make it superior to just a simple Ramdrive. Think of Michelangelo Simoni staring at a block of marble except you have the chisel and I'm coming up with figures for you to create. But for something more concrete there are some DOS related uses such as DESQview/X and using multiple virtual floppy images. This was one the last multitasking DOS programs before Windows 3.1 and 9X/ME killed it. But it was purest form of a Multitasking DOS at the time. I believe you said your Ramdisks could be formatted in DOS as real disks once the driver letter is created. If 2K is the smallest FAT16 you could create maybe your Ramdrive could support Floppy emulation. There was also FAT12 for Floppy disks. Emulation of 160KB to 2.88MB Floppy disks should be possible with the Ramdrive. Emulating a LS-120 and LS-240 might be useful for 9X/ME to run in the Ramdrive on modern systems. It might be a way to get around the Z170 AHCI issue. https://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/fs/fat/fat-1.html Disk Type Partition Size FAT Type Sectors Typical Cluster Size Floppy Disks 360K 12-bit 2 1K Floppy Disks 720K 12-bit 2 1K Floppy Disks 1.2 MB 12-bit 1 512 bytes Floppy Disks 1.44 MB 12-bit 1 512 bytes Floppy Disks 2.88 MB 12-bit 2 1K . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk There were some 8 inch floppy disks for CP/M. I got a few of these still sealed in box. You could do CP/M emulation without needing the floppy hardware using the Ramdrive. These are just a few ideas and I don't see the need to overwhelm you with all of them if it is beyond your skillset then it would be pointless since they wouldn't see fruition. But if some of these were done there would be more coming. I wouldn't see the need to PM any of that kind of personal information in order to prove I was a customer but if I were getting your source code for your programs to maintain from perishing or obsolescence or something of that nature to continue its legacy for future systems would I go that far and get to know you on such a personal level and share such information. I explained my MSFN joining history on the other thread. I don't see any reason why a customer has to prove there were a customer out of the blue. To be frank my original signing up for a MSFN account purpose had to do with Windows 2000 and a user named BlackWingCat and nothing to do with your program. I just liked 98SE and the username wasn't taken at the time although other variants were that I wanted. Your software I stumbled upon on other sites through google over the years described as a way to solve 98SE with too much memory and I did have other thoughts before buying was is the website legit, is this program trustworthy, does it work, et cetera but I felt good enough to purchase it as a backup plan in case my 98SE on Z77 plan using 512MB DDR3 failed. Although I did install 98SE successfully using physical DDR3 memory without needing any patching the USB mouse still had issues so I stopped and left the project on hold over the years. I'm finally back due to nostalgic reasons to figure it out once and for all and possibly help others get it working. . But to prove I was a customer and did purchase from you I have dug up my copy of the program and made a DOS directory listing and scrambled characters out of it to prevent pirates from seeing the actual filenames or other recognizable info regarding the commercial files in case they could be used to search for it. I think this is proof enough to compare and see they resemble the commercial files purchased by a customer. You either believe me or you don't. . 0@/09/201@ 0@:@8 PM 3,@3@ HISTORY.TXT 0@/09/201@ 0@:@4 PM @,345 LICENSE.TXT 0@/07/201@ 1@:@6 PM @2,@90 MANUAL.TXT 0@/@2/201@ 1@:@8 AM @@,5@2 @AT@@@@@.EXE 0@/0@/201@ 1@:@9 PM @,1@6 README.TXT 0@/1@/200@ 0@:@4 PM @,2@6 @@@IT@@B.EXE 6 File(s) @2,@8@ bytes . 98SE

Installing DOS and 9X/ME on Z77 for legacy testing. I will be documenting compatibility of DOS and 98SE programs on Intel Z77 Chipset.

Don't take this negatively, but I respect your work and please don't retire so if people want to use your patch and I'm assuming it is free then they should if they aren't too concerned with full backward compatibility. But from a hardware perspective I've kept at this for nearly four decades just to make sure what works or doesn't as far as compatibility all the way to the Z270. Testing 98SE on a Z77 spare system with 1GB now. But 512MB would have avoided the BSOD error on the first install. And I want to test out all Ramdrives and yours possibly later if it can be perfected further I would definitely recommend it. As for my main system it is a Z77 32GB and via USB I have 8TB external hard drives hooked up with no issues and I would go to 16TB or 17.6TB max if they were available. If I were to add secondary laptop hard drives/SSD internally I would use 2TB max which is plenty of space. I do record 8 channels of HDTV simultaneously with no issues all via USB externally. You just have to make sure the Allocation Unit Sizes are 64KB to sustain and reduce the amount of allocation units. I had done testing with 512 bytes AUS and it can be overwhelmed easily around 3 or 4 HD channels on just USB 2.0 on XP and my method has no issues hardware or software based. As for the Z77 spare for 98SE only test subject I will be putting up a topic on that momentarily. I am resurrecting it now. It was put on hold for many many years due to being busy and the recent nostalgic urge kicked in to get 98SE and DOS back for recording video/audio footage is now possible with large capacity hard drives. The 120GB and 128GB capacities are easily found on eBay or Amazon. I prefer 2.5" laptop hard drives or SSDs. I would not recommend those 3.5" IDE or SATA if that's what you were thinking. The ones I prefer aren't impossible to find if you look. The SSD variety are the easiest to find and quite cheap around $30-$60 range and the best pick for today's modern Windows 98 installation using physical hardware without patching. You can even go lower as the Boot Partition and 98SE can easily fit on a 4TB SSD if you want to go super cheap. Then add a secondary 2TB hard drive for internal storage which in your case your patch would be useful here. However if you moving any files or deleting or copying in DOS there could be a chance of corruption. The limits of DOS even through USB I have noticed as well although I'm pretty sure 120GB/128GB there should be no corruption. I wouldn't risk 4TB on my DOS/MultiOS Windows boot partition. 2TB would be the max I would consider testing but I prefer using those 2TB as external USB powered hard drives and very convenient to move from 98SE to XP to W7 to W10 without any compatibility issues nor patching. The problem is the patch is for 9X and not DOS. But true DOS programs assuming your patch works on FAT32 but not FAT16 partitions would cause an issue. I've been doing this constantly over the years or decades just to maintain backward compatibility as long as possible. Windows XP non service pack would also have issues if say your patch was 9X specific. The SATA 120GB/128GB 2.5" laptop hard drives or SSDs are my goto for primary hard drive choice even in my other modern setups. So far not one single problem when moving the hard drive around to another computer. I just use the bare bones USB to SATA adapter if I need to move data onto the drive say on XP or other OS on the fly. But the DDO you mentioned I did use back in the day from hard disk manufacturers when earlier IDE hard drives could not be fully utilized due to the older BIOS limitations. I think the earliest hard drive limitation was the 504MB one. But the most recent limitation that keeps legacy support on DOS/9X/ME/NT/2K/XP was the 128GB one. Even though 2K and XP had actual SPs to fix this capacity limit I on occasion test out vanilla OS for legacy support differences without having to worry if this hard drive was patched or not. Also I still don't recommend the first partition or your C: to be that large. Even the 2GB FAT16 MBR can store the DOS/9X/ME/2K/XP/Vista/W7 bootloader. It is around 22MB in size. I hardly combine the OS onto the same partition with the exception of DOS/9X/ME. It seems to favor the C: drive in multiple 98 partition installation tests especially when you are dealing with installing or removing internal hard drives it shifts the drive letters around so Primary Partition C: on the first drive is the best 9X/ME to install onto. 2K and XP on the other hand you could install multiple copies of each OS on as many partitions and still be differentiated on the boot loader menu. One significant advantage that it had over 9X/ME. If I really needed the space and didn't care about DOS compatibility I would prefer 8GB to 32GB FAT32 C: partition. But I always install my Program Files and redirect My Documents folder to a separate partition away from my OS to keep it lean for OS imaging.

Good to know. I just found a GeForce FX5500 I bought for testing in the Z77. I'm going to see if it recognizes it properly in 98SE.

Microsoft Software Forum Network System Operator and Grand Web Master Xper has graciously confirmed the original birth idea of MSFN took place on August 17th, 2001. I'll keep the location and the origin of where he came up with it a secret. I'm not sure if it's common knowledge or intentionally kept hidden.