Dave-H

Let's hope this one ends up as the actual final release! Thanks for all your great work guys.

Hi guys, sorry for the very long delay, but everything is now sorted! Thanks to Cyker, who generously donated an ATI X850 256 MB card to me, I'm now up and running with everything working fine. I decided to try and go back to an ATI card to see if the overlay problem went away. I vaguely remember back in the mists of time reading that the capture card I have doesn't work well, if at all, with nVidia graphics card, and this does seem to be the case as the overlay works perfectly with the ATI card. Also, the Catalyst 6.2 driver, which is the last that works on Windows 98, supports the X850, even though it's not advertised as doing so. The card arrived apparently dead, the motherboard wouldn't even recognise that it was there. Cyker said that he had flashed the BIOS with a later version though, which I thought may have got corrupted somehow. Unfortunately, trying to fix that without being able to see any output was not really practical! I therefore had to buy a cheap basic PCI graphics card that I could use in the machine temporarily, and it was waiting for that to be delivered which has caused most of the delay. Once I had it, I used it to boot the machine, and re-flashed the ATI card with the BIOS files that Cyker sent me, and it all came to life! So, all working, and very pleased indeed, thanks to Cyker! Incidentally, I didn't have to reinstall Rudolph Loew's RAM limitation patch with the /a switch. It all seemed to work fine on Windows 98 without it. I have at least proved that it's possible to get a 512 MB graphics card to work in Windows 98, even if it proved not to be a permanent option for me personally. I will keep the nVidia 7950 as a spare card I think, as AGP graphics cards are going to become harder and harder to get as time goes on I feel. If I ever dispense with the capture card, or it fails, I can put the 7950 back in, as it is a better card than the X850. Thanks everyone who has contributed to this thread, I hope its content will help others in the future, which is what this board's about of course. Cheers, Dave.

Only one version of Opera (10.60) actually needed KernelEx to run on Windows 98. This seems to have been by accident rather than by design on Opera's part, and it was corrected in 10.61. I was really glad to see that although they don't officially support Windows 98, and haven't for some time, Opera are going out of their way to try and keep the browser still working on Windows 98. I use Opera 10.61 now, with KernelEx still enabled. I only installed KernelEx to enable me to run Opera 10.60, but I see no reason to remove it now that it's there. I've also now installed Java 6 Runtime, which I think needs KernelEx, but I can't get that to work in Opera, only in Internet Explorer.

Well, interesting to hear you say that, as the first replica card I bought blew up physically after only running for about half an hour, as you will see from my thread! I managed to get hold of a proper XFX 7950 card, which works fine. I hope you don't have the same experience!

As the starter of that thread, I can vouch that I got one of those exact same cards working on my system under Windows 98SE. You will need to use Maximus-Decim's modified driver though, that is the only one I got to work. It does cause an error message on shut-down, but otherwise it seems to work fine, and I've got 4 GB of RAM fitted!

Thanks Den and MD. I thought that was probably the case. I'd better closely guard the copy of KB982381 I saved, just in case it's removed in the future. I assume this contains the very last files for IE6 SP1, and therefore for Windows 98 (and 2000).

With the release of IE cumulative update KB2183461, which is available for IE6 under Windows XP here, is it likely that its files will work on Windows 98 IE6 SP1? Is it only for IE6 SP2? It doesn't actually say that. Now that support for Windows 2000 has ended, I assumed that support for IE6 SP1 had also ended.

That's a very kind offer Cyker. If it's possible to try your card that would at least show whether it's worth going down that road or not, without having to buy yet another card only to find that it doesn't work. You're in the UK as I am so it shouldn't be too difficult, and I'll cover postage and packing costs of course.

@decorso I tried removing the capture/editing card (it's a Canopus DVRex-M1 BTW) and it didn't make any difference to anything I'm afraid. @Bleeder and halohalo Yes, I'm not really interested in games on Windows 98. If I play them at all (I'm not really a gamer) it would be in XP. The reason I decided that I needed to upgrade my video card was that I downloaded a free game from the BBC site and it would only show a black screen. Also I've used QuickTime Pro for years, and I really want to use the latest versions. Versions after 7.1 (when they dropped Windows 2000 support and changed the way that full screen functions worked) won't work properly with my old ATI card. Now I've tried a more recent card, it works fine. It's just my old capture card (which I can't replace) that the hardware overlay won't work on any more. I'm still hoping to find a card that everything works on, although I'm now worried that it doesn't actually exist!

Back again! My BFG GE 7800 GS 256 MB card finally arrived today. Put it in, and it works fine, but exactly the same as the XFX GE 7950 GT 512 MB card. That is to say I still have the two error messages in Windows 98 on start-up and shut-down, and my hardware overlay still doesn't work properly. So, it looks as if I bought it for nothing. The overlay problem is obviously nothing to do with the 512 MB of memory on the card, which I thought it might be. I've put the XFX card back in, as it's the better card. I don't know where to go from here now. At least I've proved that it is possible to get a 512 MB card working in Windows 98, if you don't mind working around a couple of niggling error messages. The overlay problem is a killer though. I can't just keep on buying cards and trying them in the hope of finding one that works! I have a nasty suspicion that the capture/editing card that I have never did really work well with nVidia graphics cards. I'm worried that even if I went for even earlier 6 or even 5 series cards I might well have the same issue. So, that leaves me with trying a more up-to-date ATI/AMD card. Someone here has been trying to use a more recent ATI card than the one I have, and it looks as if the very latest ATI AGP cards that will work with Windows 98 are the X800 series. Is that so, and if it is maybe I'll try and get hold of one.

The Java 6 Update 21 "new generation" plugin doesn't work on Opera 10.60 on my Windows 98 system either. It does work when I'm in Windows XP (dual boot) using exactly the same installations of Opera and Java. One thing which is strange, and it seems to be the same on EvanD's screen grab of his Firefox plugins page too, is that the plugin seems to have far more supported functions listed when running in Windows XP than it does when running in Windows 98, which I don't understand when it's exactly the same file from the same folder!

Although Opera 10.60 seems to be running fine for me with KernelEx installed, I have now run into a problem with java. I used to use Java 5 Update 22 with Windows 98, and it worked fine in IE6 and Opera 10.5x. I've now got Java 6 update 21 working fine in Windows 98 as far as IE goes, but it will not work in Opera. I'm just getting a blank white space where the plugin should be. Has anyone actually got this to work?

Thanks for that. I'm still waiting for my card to be delivered (I went for the cheapest shipping option!) so have nothing to report as yet. Did you ever try Maximus-Decim's modified 82.69 driver? That's the only one that will work on Windows 98 with my present 7950 GT card. I'm hoping it will work with the 7800 as well!

@MDGx Thanks as always for your input MD! I'd forgotten that the version of Orca I pointed Joe to wouldn't actually run on Windows 98! D'oh! @JoelC Unfortunately it looks as if your program just won't work under Windows 98, even with KernelEx installed. Can't win them all I'm afraid, but at least we tried! I can't think of anything else to suggest I'm afraid.

Hi Joe, welcome to the forum! So far you've done everything that I would have done to try and get a supposedly non-compatible program working on an operating system it wasn't designed for. What you should try next is to modify the msi file that you extracted so that it doesn't expect at least Windows 2000/XP. What you need is a utility called Orca. It can be downloaded here. Make a backup copy of the msi file so you've still got an un-modified copy to return to if things go wrong! If you open the msi file using Orca, you will see on the left an entry called "launchcondition". If you open it you'll see on the right what OS versions the installer expects. Probably the quickest fix is to highlight all the relevant rows, and select "cut row" from the edit menu. Then save the file, and try running it again. This is by no means guaranteed to work of course. The installer may need version 3 of the installer system, which isn't available for Windows 98. Even if it doesn't, it may still not work due to other dependencies that just aren't there, even with KernelEx. At least you've done everything you can though. Good luck!

Well, I've just bought the BFG NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS here. It only has 256 MB on board, and I will be interested to see how it compares with the XFX 512 MB card. What I'm really hoping is that the hardware overlay works again of course, but there's unfortunately no way of knowing that without actually buying the card and trying it!

DoubleSpace, now there's a blast from the past! I think I may have used it when I was running Windows 3.1 over 15 years ago. Yes, I've still got files on my system from then!

@dencorso. I've done as you suggested. I seem to have four additional files in the VMM32 folder, which are mrci2.vxd, vdd.vxd, vdmad.vxd, and vflatd.vxd. VMM.VXD is now version 4.10.2226. Unfortunately this has made no difference to either the start-up or shut-down error message. BTW, were you aware that Windows XP cannot read the version information from these files?! I was completely thrown when I came to post this while in XP and found that the Windows Explorer wouldn't show me the file information to confirm it. In Windows 98 the version information shows fine. Bizarre! @cyker Thanks for that. I had looked as the information on BIOS tweaking programs, and couldn't see any mention of being able to tweak the amount of available memory. In fact the one I tried didn't even recognise the card! I will investigate further on this. Do you have any recommendations? I have found a BFG NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GS AGP card for sale, which only has 256 MB of memory. I'm now wondering whether to try that to see if the overlay will work. I'm assuming that the modified Windows 98 driver will work with it!

My vcache.vxd and vmm.vxd files don't seem to have any version numbers. I'm actually now using RAM Limitation Patch version 7.0, with the /m option. Had a play today with the AGP Aperture setting. To cut a very long story short, changing it made no apparent difference on Windows XP, perhaps as expected, but on Windows 98 the driver only seems to work properly with it set to 128 MB. On any other setting, the driver installs OK, but doesn't work. I only get a limited range of settings (maximum 16 bit colour for instance) and no nVidia controls at all! No amount of uninstalling and reinstalling the driver seemed to make any difference unless the AGP aperture was set to 128, after which it eventually sprang to life. It's just as well that it happened to be on 128 in the first place, or I would have probably assumed that the driver just didn't work! Anyway, at least it does work with one setting! I wanted to try and see if any of the error messages went away with a different setting, but I don't think that's an option anyway by the looks of it. I'm wondering if the overlay problem is simply being caused by the fact that the card has 512 MB of memory on-board. My capture card drivers were designed many years before cards with anything like that amount were even on the horizon. Somebody said that there was a 256 MB version of the card, and the fact that the box has 512 MB on it as a separate sticker would seem to bear that out. I'm now going to investigate whether it's possible to disable half the memory on my card, perhaps by getting into its BIOS settings. I don't think physically removing anything is an option as it would be on a motherboard, and I don't think there's any jumpers on the card, unless they're hiding under the fan casing! I can live without the overlay working in Windows 98, but I must get it working somehow in XP!

Yes, I've got all the bells and whistles on my Windows 98 installation! Gape's SP 2.1a, soporific's Auto-Patcher December 2007 full with the December 2008 update, and (much more recently but still before the graphics card update) KernelEx 4.0 Final 2, which I had to apply to run Opera 10.60. All very wonderful enhancements, not forgetting Rudolph's patch too of course! Is the error message about my network card likely being caused by a memory problem which later in the boot sequence resolves itself? IIRC when I was having the start-up problem a few years ago which turned out to be because the registry was too big (since cured by Rudolph's patch) one of the ways to get the system to start was to go into Safe Mode and disable the network card. It was something to do with it being an Intel integrated NIC which uses low level memory. I'm sure Rudolph will remind me what it was all about!

Just wanted to report that "Restart in DOS Mode" works fine on my system. It's only the shutdown command that produces the "Write fault error writing device AUX" message instead of the "Windows 98 is shutting down" splash screen. Also, the only relevant setting in my BIOS for the card is the AGP Aperture setting. The options are 256, 128, 64, and 32 MB. I have it set to 128 MB, which I think is the default. Any thoughts on whether this is the best setting?

Well, tried a few more drivers today, but sadly with no success. 77.72 Even with the inf file configured correctly (thanks Rudolph!) still no go. Installed fine, but on first reboot just got a message that "NVSVC illegal operation in KERNEL32.DLL". After that even a reinstall didn't bring the driver back, so had to uninstall it, which at least worked OK. 81.78 Even worse! Again installed fine, but on reboot after the splash screen the monitor just flashed and then switched off, and the OS stopped loading. Didn't get to see any error messages! Had to put back the MS generic VGA driver in Safe Mode to even boot again. Also the driver wouldn't uninstall ("NVUDISP page fault in NVUDISP.EXE"). Had to use Driver Cleaner Pro to get rid of it. 82.16 I had hopes for this one as it was the first to have a series 7 card mentioned in its inf file (the 7800 GS). Unfortunately, this driver did exactly the same thing as 81.78! So, it looks as if Maximus-Decim's modified 82.69 driver is the only one that will actually work with the card, at least on my system. I still have the two error messages, the one saying the network card's not working (when it is!) and the one on shut-down. The first one is there whenever any driver is installed for the card, including the MS VGA driver, but not if there is no driver at all. The second one is only there when the nVidia driver is installed. And I still can't get the hardware overlay to work!

Well, another update, but not much progress to report I'm afraid. I am using patchmem with the /m switch already, as has been rightly said, and for the reasons stated. I did try using the SPLIT8MB.EXE program in autoexec.bat, but it made no difference to anything. Tried uninstalling the 82.69 driver, which I did with Driver Cleaner Pro, which I already had (I think on dencorso's recommendation some time ago when I was wrestling with another problem!) That seemed to go fine, but of course when I tried to install 77.72 to see what difference it made, it didn't know about my card. I tried inserting the necessary information into NVAGP.INF, but I don't think I got it right, as although the driver appeared to install, it wouldn't actually work! The ID for my card seems to be VEN_10DE&DEV_02E4&SUBSYS_22711682&REV_A2 although I think you only use the first bit up to the second ampersand. Presumably I have to add a line for it in the [Mfg] section and [strings] section in the inf file, but I'm unsure of the actual form the entry should take. The existing lines don't give much clue, at least not to me! Any pointers would be most welcome. Anyway, after giving up with that, it then took me ages to get the 82.69 driver to work again, but eventually it did. Incidentally, I was interested to see that the start-up and shut-down error messages both went away if there was no driver loaded for the card, so it's not just the physical presence of the card that's causing them. I then found Rudolph had posted on another thread that he'd got rid of the shut-down problem on one system by substituting some files with their 77.72 versions. These were NVDISP.DRV, NVCORE.VXD, NVARCH16.DLL, and NVSVC.EXE. I tried that and it didn't work, in fact the driver stopped working altogether when I substituted them. So, I'm just back where I was. I could bore you all even more by telling you about the issues on the Windows XP side, but this isn't the right forum!

Hi guys! Sorry for the delay, but I finally have an update. Installed the "new" card and everything went fine. Windows 98 started OK, even without the patchmem /a switch, as Rudolph said it would. The driver installed fine, and I can set all the resolutions I want. Went OK on Windows XP too. But (of course!) I have a few problems, one of which is on both operating systems. Sticking with Windows 98 issues here, the first problem is more puzzling than anything else. When I boot Windows 98, the first thing I see, after the desktop screen loads, is an error message saying that my network adapter isn't working properly and I might need to reinstall it. After Windows finishes loading, the network adapter is actually working perfectly, so what's that all about?! Also, when I shut down Windows 98, instead of the "Windows is shutting down" splash screen, I get a DOS text message saying "Write fault error writing device AUX". The options offered are "Abort, Retry, Ignore, and Fail". All the options expect "Abort" just bring the message back again exactly as before. "Abort" just goes to a flashing cursor which stays there until I forcibly re-set or switch off the system. Anyone any idea what that's about? What exactly is "device AUX"?! The message doesn't come up if I re-start, only if I shut down. The third problem, which is potentially a killer, is that the hardware overlay doesn't work on the new card with my video capture and editing card. It has a test facility which says that the overlay works fine, and is a RIVA128 type. Unfortunately if I use that the overlay screen produces a very high quality still frame, but that's all it will produce. If I play a video file it stays as a still frame, and only updates to another still frame if i move of resize the windows, but absolutely refuses to produce moving pictures! This is disastrous if I can't resolve it as I use this facility all the time, and it has always worked perfectly with the old graphics card. I will have to abandon the new card if I can't get this working. Anyone who knows about overlays got any ideas on this? The problem is the same on Windows XP, and I've tried different drivers and display settings on XP with absolutely no difference. The overlay seems to be working fine with Windows Media Player, just not the software that goes with the capture card. HELP!

Yes it's here. Still hasn't arrived yet!