Damaniel

If I was going to create a 9x app these days (my own retrodev projects are all DOS-based so this hasn't come up), I'd probably go with Delphi, or in the open source case, Lazarus. Either are easily obtained, there's plenty of documentation out there and since Lazarus and Delphi are compatible enough, most of the documentation for either will generally apply to both, and Lazarus still supports modern PCs (as does Delphi, but it's very expensive) so the skill set is transferable if you want to write software for new PCs.

Are there any good (either up to date or from the era) programmer editors, with features like syntax highlighting and color schemes? I've never had much luck running the last supported 5.x versions of Notepad++ (I don't get a save dialog, for example). I'm trying to avoid the use of KernelEx if possible since I don't use Win98 as a daily driver and want to keep things as stock as possible.

For anyone planning to use a Thinkpad T41/T42 for Windows 98, the non-P versions are much easier to set up - IBM actually provided a full set of 98 compatible drivers for the T41/T42, but only provides Windows 2000/XP drivers for the T41P/T42P.

It depends on the circumstances. For my projects (all DOS-based), I use 86Box and DOSBox-Staging for compatibility testing, but the former lacks an easy way to get my test files into the system - in DOSBox I can use a shared folder, and in a Win98 VM I can mount my NAS directly and grab files from there. In a DOS environment in 86Box, my only solution is to take the files from my main development system, create a floppy disk image in a XP VM, pop that into 86Box, and then copy the files to the correct place. Not having access to 98 VMs in VMWare was a big enough deal that I almost considered sending back my Ryzen 3900X - I use it that much and it completely messed up my workflow. I ended up settling with using an XP VM (which has 'close enough' compatibility via NTVDM) and using DOSBox-Staging for most of my testing. If I want to test on accurate hardware, I just plop it onto my 486 (well, at least when I have it hooked up, anyway).

My Ryzen 3900X based system has the same issues with virtualization as the older Ryzens, using VMWare 15.5. Disabling the 32 bit disk drivers also fixed my problem (at least for the time being).

Does anyone have a copy of the final supported Notepad++ release for 98SE (5.9 ANSI)? The Notepad++ website was rewritten a while back and they don't link to pre-6.x releases anymore.