awkduck

I wish I was talking about HD Audio. There is sound. But yeah, it worked without WDMEX.

Applications crashing, at load time (searching for DX plugins) using WDM AC97 audio drivers, has been solved. As an example, in FL Studio 5 and Sonar2.2XL, a work around is to have the application's .exe run in XP compatibility mode (KernelEx). But the option "Don't use these settings in child processes" must be checked. If you do not select that option (XP compatibility only) your audio device will available in the application, but the device will not have functioning input or output. I should mention again, that this issue existed without the presence of KernelEx, on the system. It was not the cause of issue, but part of the solution.

I don't see too much being posted about Wdmex. Could be that the procedure to success is clear, in the instructions. Also, it is pretty clear that it might just not work, even if you've done everything right. Mostly, for some reason or another, Wdmex has nudged drivers "that are for my system (Win98FE)" to actually work. Some drivers, at the edge of dropping Win98 support, were not very good. Recently, I tested a 2009 Win2K-Vista Sigmatel C-major driver. Fortunately, the driver still used the "Chicago" signature. The .inf file modifications were minor. Entries like "something.nt.inst" just needed converting to "something.inst". There where no registry entries or folder locations, that needed WinNT to Win9x conversions. The .inf file was too big for Windows 98 to use. I don't know what the size limit is. But I was able to fix that, by deleting localization info I didn't need. Also, the file was in unicode text format. It needed to be saved as a plain text file. I haven't extensively tested the driver. I did notice, that when selecting options for mixer controls, that the record (line-in/mic) options where located in playback; this rather than the record category. I don't know if that will cause issues with some programs, when trying to assign input. Also, the head phones now have their own mixer bar, rather then just automatically being controlled by the main volume. However, the main volume still determines the final output, once you un-mute the head phones and adjust that volume. I'm guessing that this setup is common to newer versions of Windows. The main volume control only adjusts the speakers. The previous drivers, generic Realtek Vxd and Wdm, were limited by directsound emulation. The new drivers are not listed as such, and test fine under Dxdiag. I've had other issues, with the Realtek drivers, and haven't test against them. The AC97 Sigmatel is a pretty cheap audio device. So even though this is a success, in means of quality audio production (recording/sampling), I haven't accomplished much. But I could see non-emulated directsound being useful. Rloew, where ever you are (in the beyond), thanks again!

There is also Avidemux Version 2.5.6 (no H.264/5). For the command line there is FFmpeg or LibAV (at least H.264 and probably H.265). Needs KernelEx.

From "My Computer", right click on the drive and select properties. The label should be shown, and is editable.

You should check the .inf file used to install your driver. You can open it with Notepad. Near the top of the file there will be an entry, with the word "Signature". If it is shown as: Signature = "$Windows NT$" this driver most likely will not work. This is what you are looking for: Signature = "$Chicago$" Also, you can go to "Control Panel" > "System" > "Device Manager" (tab) > then right click on your installed driver and select "Properties". When the device properties window opens, click on the "Driver" tab. If the "Driver File Details" button is grey out (you can't click on it), then your driver is most likely not compatible with your version of Windows. It will also have a message like: No driver files are required or have been loaded for this device. To update the driver files for this device, click Update Driver. This message is only okay for passive\non-hardware devices. An example is the "PCMCIA Card Service" device. If you are installing a driver, for hardware, then you should most likely be able to click on the "Driver File Details" button and see list of driver files. I don't think Acer ever released/developed Win9x "SDcard Adapter" drivers, for the "Aspire 1690". You don't need a patch or anything like that. If you do your research, you might be able to get those "Windows NT" driver working, on Win9x. But that is beyond the kind of help most can provide you, though a forum. You'll need to modify the .inf file, to conform with the "Chigaco" .inf specifications. Likely you'll need at least Rloew's WDMEX tool and more over WDMStub. You'll want to look at checking any DLL files with Dependency Walker and get a hold of WDMCHECK. Quite frankly, the work involved is often beyond what most people are willing to do. There is also no guarantee that you will have any success. As with NT designed Video device drivers, NT SDcard adapter drivers just might not have potential to work with Win9x. Edit: ------- "You could try your luck with a PCMCIA SDcard Adapter, providing it has drivers for Win9x. But it might come with some built in size limitation (the driver's limitation, not a Windows limitation). You'd want to research the product before buying it. I've had partial luck with a cheap generic PCMCIA card. It uses IOS.xvd and ESDI_506.pdr, from Windows 98. But they are not sufficient, and potentially counter productive, towards the card's functionality. I haven't looked into it." I looked into the PCMCIA/SDcard adapter, that I have (some cheap generic model). I assumed some functionality issues; but once the SDcard was formatted everything worked fine (32Gb). I'm guessing a PCMCIA/CFcard adapter would also work fine. But this is dependent on a couple of things. One is your "CARD BUS" being functional. Some card bus .inf files, for Win9x, just reference Windows files. So if you find that your card bus is not installed, you could potentially build one using your card bus pci vender/device id. The other is finding a PCMCIA card that isn't incompatible with Win9x. I can't make any promises, but the hardware is relatively simple; so most are likely fine. ------- The best chance, is a SDCard to USB adapter. But it is my guess, that this isn't something your interested in. Wish I had better news to share. It would be nice to use those SDcards. If I ever get NT SDcard adapter drivers to work for Win9x, I'll make a post about it. That kinda thing only happens when I get free time. Edit: I've never tested one, but it is possible that a CFcard to PCMCIA adapter may work. I know that it wouldn't solve you problem. But for extra storage space, it might be an option. Some are designed to insert, with the CFcard, flush with the laptop's shell.

Many Intel GPUs don't produce as much heat. The "Rugged" brand of Toughbooks have a heat spreader, about the size of and underneath of the keyboard. The cases hard surface is just to make it more durable. If you do buy one, make sure it comes with the Harddrive caddy. Unlike some common laptops, you cannot install a Harddrive without the caddy. The laptop's harddrive interface uses a special connector; the caddy comes with the adapter for it. I have not used the 855 GPU myself. But I have seen many "Win9x" drivers for it. It is the "Intel Extreme Graphics 2" integrated graphics processor. I've been planning to buy one myself, for some time. It should perform good, for Retro 3D. The audio chipset is AC97 "Sigmatel". In real dos you can use SMEMU for Soundblaster emulation (no 16bit protected mode, only real and 32bit protected mode). In Windows many Dos Games will work with audio (must use WDM audio driver). But some will only partially work, like Wolf3D. You can either use and SDL1.2 port of those games (if available), or use real Dos with SBEMU. Games like Doom and Quake worked with audio inside windows. This is because of the music being on the Disc/ISO (ReadBook).

The CF-28 is fanless and supports Win9x 3D Acceleration (i8xx series GPU). The closest one to the CF-28, that I know of, is the CF-18. But some come with i915 (no Win9x 3D acceleration) and others with i8xx (Win9x 3D acceleration compatible). You have to be careful when buying one. The issue is that you don't often (if ever) find one over 1.2Ghz. Some, with the i8xx, come between 800Mhz and 1.2Ghz. I have seen one, with the i815, advertised at 1.6Ghz; but I think they must have made a typo, or something. It was the only one I've ever seen. Both the CF-18 and CF-28 come with external VGA ports. Most older Toughbook/Toughpads do. One thing that the CF-18 does not have, is a parallel port (the CF-28 does). Both have a serial port. I should point out that the CF-28 is Pentium III, and the top CPU speed is 1Ghz (some are slower). The CF-18 is Pentium-M. I haven't done any benchmarks, but an 800Mhz Pentium-M might out perform a 1Ghz Pentium-III. Also, the CF-28 tops out at 512Mb of ram. The CF-18 at 1.5Gb. The CF-28 is also running with USB1.1, and the CF-18 is at USB2.0. There is a part number, on the bottom of these ToughBooks, that may help determine what GPU the laptop has. If you are looking on Ebay, some seller might not know how to find out what the GPU model is. So there is a chance, if they provide that model number (pictures), that you can find out yourself; provided they are selling you the one in the picture. You've gotta watch out, when some one is selling more than one. I've learned that the hard way, when buying thin clients.

I also don't know what dock means. This may or may not help; I don't know what the entire situation is. If the drive is good (no corruption), and just the O.S. integrity is lost, maybe you can just copy the XP setup files to the drive. This is assuming you have another computer you can connect the drive to. If so, you can system format the drive as a FAT32, with a Win98 boot disk or cdrom. Copy SMARTDRV.EXE and the XP setup folder i386 over. Reinstall the drive into the original machine. Boot it up, then run SMARTDRV.EXE before running i386\WINNT.EXE. After setup is complete, I think you can convert the drive to NTFS. I am at the edge of my Windows experience, when it comes to XP.

What does the error message say? Did Windows ever try to install drivers, for the USB enclosure?

2014 at the oldest, and 2016 at the newest. Western Digital Elements. It was this one, but instead of P/N: WDBUZG0010BBK-EESN it was P/N: WDBUZG0010BBK-04.

Rloew created the 137GB patch (48bit addressing mode, for drives over 137GB). But that's for IDE 48bit addressing. I don't know that you need it for USB. What USB drivers are you using? NUSB? SP3? If you have another drive to test with, or if it is not an issue to reformat your 500Gb drive, you can try a FAT32 formatting (maybe you already have?). If it works, you probably don't need a patch (not for Windows, anyway). I know that I could not mount a NTFS formatted drive, that had been prepared by Linux (older version). But once I used Paragon to prepare the driver, everything was fine. The only issue was that the partition was really slow on transfers, with Linux; it was fine with Win98. For the record, it was a 1GB NTFS USB (internally SATA) drive. I think Paragon NTFS (which is the driver from SP3) supports NTFS 1.2, 3.0, and 3.1. But I didn't think the NTFS changes, after Windows XP, were too significant. The backwards compatibility is supposed to be pretty good. But that's between different versions of Windows NT; maybe Paragon missed something. Did you format the 16GB and 500GB with the same method? What method(s) did you use? Sorry, that I can't give you better help. Maybe it isn't even a formatting issue. How new is the USB drive or Housing? I've had issues with certain combinations of SATA2USB and Hard Drive firmware, not working on every machine.

This is just a early version of the Universal Vesa/VBE Win9x driver, from Bear Windows, patched "for Intel 915GM" Later versions, of the driver, may have improved on this patched driver's capabilities. It may have 2D acceleration. But it will not have 3D acceleration. I do admire your commitment, to find one (3D driver). I've looking into writing driver, for Win9x. Video drivers look like a lot of work. I do wonder if the Bear Windows driver could be used as a base, for a modular 3D video driver. The driver could expose a basic set of 3D implements, that rely on a GPU specific module file. Maybe even include 3D capabilities, that can be disabled or offloaded to software rendering, if not actually present in the GPU. I don't know what it would be like to target DirectX. I wonder if it might be better to target OpenGL and WineD3D. Then you could support multiple versions of DirectX. WineD3D would need to be part of the driver. Even with the GPU specific implenation(s) aside, it would be a lot of work And, I'm not even sure it would really work. It certainly wouldn't perform like a vendor driver.... Just dreaming on it, a little.

I'm sorry to hear that. My T42 just stopped turning on one day. It always ran a little hotter, then I thought it should. I blamed the GPU. I still keep it around. Donated the memory to a T40 (post Win9x Intel GPU), I had to buy in a mixed Ebay lot. I hope you find something good.

@WhiteArmpits There are some "OpenGL" environment variables you could try. For a test, you could try "LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=TRUE". You could check the OpenGL version supported by your GPU, then try "MESA_GL_VERSION_OVERRIDE=2.1". 2.1 could be set to whatever versions your GPU supports. I know using the VBEMP Vesa driver, I've needed to set environmental variables for SDL1.2 video and audio output/rendering. Otherwise some SDL applications/games run poorly. This is more true if your audio driver doesn't support accelerated Directsound (some AC97 drivers). So maybe you can tweak OpenGL to play along. You would open a Command Prompt, in the folder of the OpenGL application you are testing, and type something like: Then from that same Command Prompt enter the command to initiate your OpenGL application (Minecraft). Minecraft may also have environmental variables, that could be set. It might not be a bad idea to check that out; especially if there is something to set comparability with older OpenGL versions.

So software render works fine. @TheMajorTechie This question doesn't help WhiteArmpits, it is just out of curiosity. Is OpenGL hardware accelerated, after you install your video driver?

I'm working on trying to build a few things. There are plenty of gotchas, when targeting Win9x. The JHRobotics pthread9x might be useful for using newer Msys2/mingw-w64 (32bit or target 32bit). You could then "maybe" avoid issues, that occur from using older build environments/tooling. If you were trying to build Mesa 21.* for Win98/ME, you could compare your build error outputs to the JHRobotics project, and merge the fix into yours (supposing there were patches implemented/required?). On a side note: I started wondering if the reason it didn't work for you, but did for TheMajorTechie, has something to do with video drivers. Maybe there is a minimum OpenGL requirement, that you card doesn't have? We're looking at OpenGL4.x against drivers that support OpenGL 2.1 and maybe 3.x.

Didn't you, at one point, have a build environment setup? Or was that only for building Qemu, and not for building Win9x software?

This is on the Github page: So you could try using the Win95 Mesa 17.

What do you mean "replace system files"? Reverse engineer and replace, patch in place, or use newer versions (maybe patched)? I've wanted to extend Win32s (Win3.x) and add full fat32 support, to early Win95. Anyway, I had heard that extremely early versions of KernelEx supported Win95. But I never found any, and assumed what I had read was someones misunderstanding.

I've seen that, too. Haven't tried it. Have you used it?

Windows 95 - Mingw and TDM GCC 4.7.1? Windows 98/ME - Mingw/Mingw-w64/TDM GCC 5.4.* (PII and higher)? Dwarf vs sjlj? Cross compile vs native? WINVER, _WIN32_WINNT, and _WIN32_WINDOWS? Does GCC even use _WIN32_WINDOWS? Msys, Msys2, Cygwin? I've been using Msys, Mingw-w32 GCC 5.4.0, and Wine. I haven't tested using natively, with KernelEx. It may not work natively (Mingw GCC 4.7.* or 4.8.* was the last to run natively?). I've thought about doing a custom GCC build; but I haven't needed one yet.

What GCC compilers/compiler distributions are people using to target Windows 98? Just brewing their own builds? Edit: Never mind. The question only partially fits the thread's current state.

Dxirc, is an IRC that works with Win98 (KernelEx). It has SSL, DCC, and handles scripts. I recommend the dxirc-1.30.0-fox-portable.zip package. The intended portable part of the package is useless. The folder you want is "\dxirc\App\dxirc". Once it is save elsewhere, the previously underlying folders/files can be deleted. The setup.exe package is fine, but it includes both the QT (unusable) and Fox user interface files. The client is mostly functional. I've had to manually enter custom folder locations (logs, DCC, scripts, etc.). The browse window does not work correctly, but it allows you to manually type your locations. Alternatively, you can open the "dxirc.ini" file, with notepad. The folder locations can be modified there. The application will also create settings folders/files at the root directory, of the drive you ran it from (\foxrc\dxirc-fox.ini and \dxirc\dxirc.ini). This can be fixed, to some degree. You'll need a hex editor, to modify "dxirc-fox.exe" and "libFOX-1.6.0.dll". For "dxirc-fox.exe" you need to search for the string "dxirc.ini" (without quotations). * = 00 (zeroed out) Change \*dxirc*\dxirc.ini*AppData to **prefs*\dxirc.ini******** Now "dxirc.ini" will be saved/loaded from the "prefs" folder, from inside the main "dxirc" folder. For "libFOX-1.6.0.dll", I essentially just prevent the creation of the "\foxrc\dxirc-fox.ini" folder and file. Now search for the string "USERPROFILE" Change USERPROFILE*\foxrc to USERPROFILE**foxrc In my option, the settings saved in "dxirc-fox.ini" are pretty insignificant. You'll probably never notice them being gone. However, it is simple to change back. If you haven't already, you'll want to adjust your Windows TCP settings. Maybe with TCPOptimizer (ver 3.0.8). If you keep the default Windows TCP settings, things will crawl. Also, Dxirc does not come with a populated server list. You'll need to add the servers to the list.

I haven't really used ME. ME still uses the Win9x "net" command.... Right? Only environment variables are supposed to be read from Autoexec.bat and Config.sys (via the registry?). But that doesn't mean another (NDIS2) initiation wasn't supplied. ME was meant to be legacy free, so I suppose NDIS2 could've been dropped. If you are trying, what is happening? Is this a system you haven't setup yet, seeking NDIS2 validation first?