Drugwash

Unfortunately this discussion will remain academic to me because I'm literally starving to death and the electricity bill was due three weeks ago so no way I could buy that card - or anything else for that matter. Original Creative cards may be of better quality than others but there may be problems with driver compatibility and also certain models may not be correctly detected by some software (games etc). A friend of mine had such cards and he did complain quite a few times. I also stumbled once into a card pulled from a Dell machine (it had a Dell subsys ID) and just couldn't find a matching driver. That machine of mine had/has a custom IBM BIOS that does not allow one to change HDD parameters, it handles them automatically. Actually there's not much one can change there, it's mostly for viewing information. Regardless of the HDD capacity it will only report 528MB, which used to be a strange common limitation back then. Windows 95 could run just fine off that HDD but there was not enough free space for applications and storage. With the help of the IDE controller on the ESS card I could hook up a 1.2GB Quantum HDD and was a happy camper until that fatal "plug" day. Can't remember how transfer speed was, for a 486 DX66 operation was quite slow generally (originally was an SX25, had to replace the 50MHz quartz oscillator with a 66MHz one after upgrade because it wouldn't go higher than 50MHz). The three IDE controllers may have been the problem in your case, not a faulty HDD. The OS only allocates IRQ14 and IRQ15 for IDE if I recall correctly, and there may be other "fixed" things such as memory addresses, DMA etc that cannot be handled properly by Win9x when more than two IDE controllers are installed.

The machine in question only had one IDE channel on the main board, which was detected by the OS as the primary channel. The IDE on the sound card was not detected by the BIOS but only by the OS (and designated as secondary channel), so one could not boot the machine from a HDD connected to that channel. I don't recall if there was any jumper on the sound card that would specifically choose which channel should the IDE be assigned to. If your main board already had two IDE channels then the OS would indeed have had trouble with a third one on the sound card, since only with the advent of SATA did the Windows OS start to acknowledge and configure more than two IDE channels - something the Win9x line doesn't do AFAIK. To mount an additional HDD to that particular machine it would need an extra IDE channel, either built into a soundcard or separate as an ISA card. The machine only has ISA slots and a VESA slot - no PCI. Any IDE2SATA adapters should be compatible with the old IDE/ATA standard employed by such ISA card. I vaguely remember having a few "newer" (at the time) HDDs that wouldn't be detected by the BIOS at all due to certain differences between the board IDE controller's standard and the standard used in the HDDs, so an adapter may face the same problem. BIOS hot swapping works but one must be extremely careful with every aspect of the operation. It's crucial that the chips are the exact same model or pin to pin compatible if they come from different brands/manufacturers. Sometimes they may be pin to pin compatible but operate with different voltage (i.e. 3.3V vs 5V, or 5V vs 12V), so that should also be taken into account. Two apparently identical main boards may use completely different chips so don't take board ID for granted. Accurate chip datasheets are mandatory.

One can see all this "plug" stuff can be quite confusing for someone who doesn't master English perfectly or is somewhat tired and/or distracted at the moment. Technical terms can be tricky sometimes. Well, lesson learned - the hard way. Maybe PCI behaves differently than ISA, maybe that particular machine had some quirks, maybe it was bad luck on my side - who knows. I remember there was a weird sound, like whistling or something, for a second or two then silence. That sound card never worked again but the machine did, and I still have it stashed in a cabinet. Fired it up a couple years ago just for kicks, it was still working. I think it has another sound card, an ESS1868 I believe, but couldn't find one with an IDE controller so can't attach a secondary HDD. That I don't know, not sure if it would work but it just may. I know I did BIOS hot swapping a couple times in order to rewrite the chips that wouldn't start other boards, but that's a slightly different story. That would be correct according to Wikipedia, however in practice I personally never had any such problems. There may be issues for the OS when replacing previously connected device with a different one, mostly regarding mice, but a keyboard should not create problems other than the slower repeat rate as mentioned above. The current drawn by either device is usually low considering a PS/2 port can only provide 275mA. Certain boards provide protection - at least theoretically - through fuses, as I noticed few times while working with hardware.

There used to be a few variations of Win95 including a pan-european one but never one for my specific language (Romanian). Either way the installer itself would have most likely still been in English (I may be wrong on that though). One could still set a few limited things like keyboard layout to their native language with the English version but I remember I had to copy over all fonts from the pan-european version in order to actually get the special characters in my language (şţâăî ŞŢÂĂÎ) to display properly. Thinking about it, the wording "while Windows is running" does sound peculiar. Windows can be running only while the computer is running. The correct wording shoud've been "while/after Windows is [already] installed" or something similar but I guess they never thought someone like me could actually plug in a card. Man, was I stupid!

Yeah, that may well be the case. However, considering not everybody is a native English speaker a "device" can be anything in one's mind - including an ISA/PCI/VESA/etc card. As mentioned above there weren't many other types of devices that could safely be plugged in/out at the time so one could easily get confused. Well, you have now. Nice to meet you. BTW it wasn't a tower but a desktop, very easy to open: just press a button, slide the cover to the back for about 10 cm and pull it up. Here's a picture: As for hot plugging keyboard/mouse I remember the mouse could be a problem - as in not (re)detected - but keyboard would usually be (re)detected except for the speed setting that would be (re)set to default. There used to be a key repetition delay option in certain boards' BIOS that could be set to a lower value and it would work fine at power up or reset/reboot, but if keyboard - either AT or PS/2 - was plugged out and back in while the computer was running the value would be reset to the default high so keypress repeating became very slow.

It was an OEM setup I believe, most likely a Win95 2.0 or 2.1 - definitely not a 2.5 because it didn't have USB support. All my HDDs - internal and external - are so packed right now that I couldn't find any spare space for a VM if I wanted to. Not even sure if the disc would still be viable either, after all that time and all installations back then.

Laughable at. However the "you'll keep getting windows 95 updates" bit reminds me of an old mishap that I find hard to laugh at even now. Back at my beginnings as a Win9x user I was installing Win95 and later on 98SE quite often on the old 486 IBM ValuePoint, either due to hardware change, various viruses or whatever other reasons. At some point - I believe it was with Win95 but I'm not 100% sure anymore after 20+ years - during one of the installations I actually paid attention to the various screens advertising the "mighty features" that version had over "previous" version. Wish I hadn't. One of those screens mentioned Plug 'n play and I clearly remember it saying one could even plug in a card while Windows was running. A very unfortunate choice of words. Although I did have enough experience with hardware, and something at the back of my mind kept saying I shouldn't take that statement literally, some devil kept whispering in my ear I should try it. So when the OS installation finished I simply took my ESS1869 ISA soundcard and plugged it in with the computer on and Windows running - exactly as advertised. Needless to say the OS got screwed up and that wonderful card got instantly fried. Could never find another one like that (it had a built-in IDE controller that was crucial for adding a HDD larger than the max 528MB accepted by the BIOS considering the mobo only had one IDE channel occupied by main HDD and a CD-ROM, and it was correctly detected as Sound Blaster Pro by all of the games I was testing back then). So yeah, the 9x team back then had quite a lot of vision but they also made mistakes, some of them with tragic consequences for poor users. I suppose whoever tested Windows 11 upgrade on a Win95 system in the picture above would not wait for any Windows 95 updates anymore...

From a humane point of view dying in prison at 75 is just sad. Politics and money unfortunately complicate things up to an (almost) incomprehensible level for us regular people. Back in my 9x days I used to run a few free standalone/on-demand virus scanners: a NOD32, a McAfee (possibly niche targeted) and TrendMicro's sysclean. The latter was the most used although downloading and matching all different definitions was kind of a pain. There were two versions of sysclean, one of them being specially crafted to fight against a very nasty bug that wouldn't let the regular executable run. I did save a lot of systems using that combination of tools. My system was kinda shielded by my... let's say intuition of where to navigate and where not to, what to run (blindly) and what not to. After gathering a list of trusted applications and finding AHK which allowed me to freely build my own tools the need of an anti-virus dissapeared almost completely, keeping those AV tools only for occasionally helping friends. As a fun fact I still keep a nice assortment of old "bugs" - found on various systems - on a hardware write-protected USB stick. Back then I had the intention of studying them in the idea of better understanding the operating system with its weak points so that I could design my own warning/protection tool. As always life got in the way and the intention remained an intention.

Yeah, it's best to use system's own APIs to perform the conversions. I built an AHK script that basically does what UCyborg's exe does. Only difference is that the output format can be tweaked by editing the dFormat and tFormat strings in the beginning of the script, or leaving them blank for using system default date/time formats (uncomment subsequent line by removing the semicolon). An interesting thing is that Wine (my version 5.14 devel) has the 9x binary value wrong, showing 1997.11.28, 16.09.02 - which most likely is the release date of Windows98, not the date Wine has first been installed on this system. But considering how they screwed up the memory retrieval as well it's no wonder. Anyway, here's the script, hope it serves some purpose. (minor doc error: functions mention LOCALE_SYSTEM_DEFAULT - which is 0x800 - but actually they use LOCALE_USER_DEFAULT - 0x400) WinInstDate.ahk

Not the answer you expected but hoping it could help. Personally I've only been using POP Peeper from Esumsoft for POP3/IMAP accounts for years under 98SE and XP. I'm still using it now through Wine under Linux Mint, because all Linux e-mail clients I've tried are lousy and nowhere near my personal taste. The free version doesn't allow access to folders other than Inbox but that may not be such a big issue. At least one can check their messages and reply/compose. There is one thing about AOL. Dunno if you received the notification but starting this June they will implement something on their servers that will kick out many well-known e-mail clients. Logging in may require a master password or something like that, and I'm not sure which clients will be able to fulfill this requirement. Not even sure about POP Peeper but we'll just have to wait and see. If need to I will delete my AOL account and they may go to hełł with their draconic measures. I've already deleted GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo accounts years ago.

Thanks for the heads up. Indeed there's a 2.1GB swap file on the root partition. Problem is, it's always been there, but at first install and about a year or more after that the amount was being displayed correctly. Something changed in Wine between v4.0 and v5.14. Here's a screenshot of the very same application (my own MemPanel) running simultaneusly in Wine 4.0, 5.14 and 6.0 (4.0 and 6.0 are under PlayOnLinux, 5.14 is default on the system). Amazingly, even the total system load (left of bottom progressbar) appears much higher than normal. Native Mint applet shows a 1.67GB RAM usage out of 4GB. Whadda...?! Anyway, this is way off-topic here. Thanks again.

For the startup stuff I was succesfully using CodeStuff Starter on both 98SE and XP. One minor problem is that the latest version (something ending in .29) had a faulty installer that wouldn't run on 98SE, but the zip version was fine - just unpack somewhere and run the exe. No need for msconfig or others. For some reason my 98SE machine seems to botch the registry upon every shutdown after upgrading the memory to 768MB a while ago. I did use a patched vxd (forgot its name) that was supposed to take care of the memory excess, and indeed the system only "sees" 512MB, but there must be something else to it. Didn't get a chance to try late Mr. Loew's patch, guess with age I lost my edge and am too afraid of screwing up badly. Therefore upon each new boot I have to restore the registry through the scanreg /restore you mentioned. Wasn't aware - or probably forgot along with too many other things - about the backup limit; will try to type that down and hopefully remember to apply it next time I start that machine. Thanks for the tip! One funny fact: after some random upgrade quite some time ago my Linux Mint system reports to Wine a whopping amount of 6GB of RAM instead of the physical 4GB. The native tools do report the correct amount but my AHK script MemPanel stubbornly says 6. Kinda like the "modern" chinese temperature samplers built into various appliances (usually desktop digital clocks): the one built by myself more than a decade ago shows 16.5°C, an AKAI clock-thermometer-radio-bluetooth speaker half meter away shows 18°C and a random clock 2cm left of the AKAI shows 20°C. All at the same vertical level (actually mine is about 10cm higher). No heat source in the vicinity. Go figure placebo: if they say it's 20°C then it must be! Makes one think deeper...

Yeah, the past has a nasty habit of comin' back to bite one in the a$$. So incredibly happy to see you back alive man! Thought you were a goner after all this time. Bite my tongue! Heard life is kinda harsh down under. Hope you're coping as well as possible, all things considered. Take care man and thank you for all you've done for the community!

Latest version of API Parameter Count is 1.0.2.0. Initial release can be found in the large package here. A repackage can be found here. It adds previous versions 1.0.0.0 and 1.0.1.0 as scripts only (in the source folder) and a fixed section name in the ini file. Also, due to a programming error the application cannot unpack the internal copy of the ini file upon first start, remaining in a file open loop until fed with a proper path, therefore a copy of the ini has been placed in the executable folder making it easy for the user to select it.

Agreed. For some weird reason I always ignored everything related to MIDI although didn't even know what it was all about. Only about two years and a half ago out of sheer curiosity I took on improving an AHK script for a virtual piano keyboard that was working with MIDI. And I was stunned by what MIDI can actually do. Digging for that script now and testing it I sadly discovered that Wine doesn't do MIDI currently on this notebook, and Mint itself is not configured to play MIDI. Will have to dig around and try to fix things. Unfortunately, my mod of the original script aims to be compatible with most keyboard layouts so there may be Unicode problems if attempted to run under Win9x. If you wanna play with the script you can check out this topic in AHK forums, latest available version being attached here (v1.3.3). There's also a debug package below (v1.3.3.1).

I stand corrected, my bad for not keeping up to date. Kudos to roytam1 for all the work. So at least XP users have a chance of being closer to current requirements. There are still a lot of things to implement even in official Pale Moon before considering it up to par with the other browsers/engines (try to open rottentomatoes.com in latest available Pale Moon - v28.16.10 as of now - and it will greet you with unsupported-browser?err=custom-elements,shadow-dom). Additionally, from what I read on the PM forums starting with next version (v29) there will be major changes in handling add-ons, those non-specifically made for PM will be refused from installing/loading. Considering most add-ons are not being maintained anymore in the original form and very few of them have been officially ported to Pale Moon, I am concerned about the future usability of Pale Moon.

You're starting to master your AHK scripts, good for you. In no time more complex actions will become very easy to perform through hotkeys. Then maybe you'll start building GUIs for fine tweaking settings or converging multiple actions in a single button click. Soon you'll realize you became a hobbyist programmer. Just like me :) There are a couple of built-in plug-ins that come with the main executable. At least the additional AAC plug-in should be installed for certain radio stations to work (as mentioned above). Maybe other formats would be required by other stations, haven't checked this in depth. It may be best to create subfolders for plug-ins and skins in order to keep the main folder clean. I did create a skins subfolder, copied/unpacked there all skins found on the official site, and they are recognized without problems. I suspect the same would be the case with plug-ins in case many of them would be installed. After briefly reviewing all the installed skins I settled for Euphoria, at least for now. The only thing bothering me is that playlist cannot be resized, at least not with this particular skin. The extended playlist shows the encoding types of the files and radio stations, and intelligently strikes with a red line those that cannot be played due to missing plug-in or other reason(s). The encoding type can also be displayed by the default playlist; just right-click the playlist and choose Display columns > Type. Hopefully you're not mistaking SSE2 for SSL2. SSE/2/3 are CPU instruction sets that depend on the CPU hardware generation. The compiler used to build the application can be instructed to use one, the other or none of those sets at build time, thus resulting (in)compatibility with certain CPU generations, such as first AMD Duron generation that does not have any SSE whatsoever. The IA-32 builds of Pale Moon by Mercury were built at my request and tested them on an old machine running XP-SP3 on such Duron CPU. Whether those builds can use SSL2/3 or TLS1/2 - that I don't know. Now, newest changes in code as well as the maintainer's upgrade of the OS and building environment led to the application losing even XP compatibility. Given time it's most likely it will lose Win7 compatibility too, then Win8.x and so on. If it will still exist by then. There is a theoretical possibility that someone else takes the code, replaces newer APIs with those existent in Win98, changes building settings to match latest IDE that can produce Win9x-compatible executables and libraries, and builds a perfectly Win9x-compatible Pale Moon. I say theoretical possibility because that would be a huge, close to impossible endeavour given all the changes that would be required. On top of that, performing same changes additionally to tracking and adapting each new changes or additions with each minor/major version would be exhausting and time-consuming even for someone with no other responsibilities whatsoever. Even restoring XP compatibility would be a hard task, otherwise someone might've taken on it by now, I guess. Unfortunately the above is valid for much/most of the current software, although exceptions such as XMPlay show that when there's a will there's a way. And since this defective world runs almost exclusively on money and not on good will, we will never see the real freedom of using whatever hardware and software we want/like/own/afford while having them all indiscriminately compatible with the services they'd have to operate with. I wonder, if - or when - machines will have taken over the Earth, would they immediately end this hardware & software discrimination, or would they behave exactly like us humans have done with each-other since forever...? Food for thought.

Same here. Got about 12-14 units around me in this room, most of which might still work if provided proper peripherals and power. Scarce physical space though, and not enough peripherals. Ranging from my first computer ever - a 486DXII-66MHz IBM PS/ValuePoint - to some Intel dual core or so (that one I actually bought at the flea market). There are old archived third-party Pale Moon builds for early generations PentiumII/III and AMD Duron/Athlon lacking SSE2 and even for non-SSE CPUs. Unfortunately they only work in XP and later. Courtesy of user Mercury: - IA-32 (non-SSE) builds are here. Forum discussion (locked) here. - SSE-only builds are here. Forum discussion (locked) here. There is also a SSE-only Linux version here. Courtesy of user Walter Dnes. Forum discussion (locked) here. At the same archive location one may also find old versions for Raspberry Pi 2, Slackware, and maybe others. Please check the Pale Moon forum board for topics related to these versions. Nice find, it's been a long long time since I last visited their site, used to dabble with the BASS plug-in in AutoHotkey. I wonder if all additional plug-ins are also compatible with Win9x without requiring KernelEx. Trying it under Wine first, just for kicks. Requires at least one change in winecfg: comctl32.dll set as native, otherwise the Preferences panel will be empty. Same goes for Winamp 2. However, after finishing with the settings comctl32 must be set back to built-in and XMPlay reloaded, otherwise it will crash when trying to add a file/URL to playlist. For now it failed with UK BASS RADIO and s2.stationplaylist links but does play The HUM and most others (from links somewhere above). Will try to add some plug-ins, see if that fixes those stations. EDIT: added a few plug-ins including the one for AAC and now both previously failing stations are working.

Done. My Soyo SY-6VBA133 (P II-III) is still working after ten years of 24/7 load, with about one year of stand-by in between and only sporadic launches lately. I have two HP Vectra VL420 (P4) one of which had 9 (nine) bulging/leaking capacitors last time I checked (about two years ago) and the other one failing to start up about first nine times out of ten. Come to think about it most boards that ended up in my junk pile are from early Intel P4/AMD Athlon XP era. I did manage to replace a few capacitors years ago when my eyesight wasn't as bad as now. Did that even for videocards, not only for motherboards.

Wow, could be my failing memory but I never thought any Winamp version above 2.x would work in Win9x. There once was a plethora of skins for Winamp, both for classic and modern versions. I still have a few dozen in a folder on a USB stick. But I stopped using Winamp many years ago, switched to skwire's Trout instead only because it was built in AutoHotkey using BASS and back then I was interested in what the BASS library could do. And then I just stopped listening to music altogether, for some unknown reason. Regarding weather apps, for a brief period I used another of skwire's scripts - sWeather - but that was only under XP since it was built with the newer Unicode AHK 1.1.x. Shouldn't be too hard to build such application in AHK or any other language, the only problem might be getting an API key from weather providers that require one. In Linux Mint I have a Cinnamon desklet for weather, it has ten available weather stations to choose from, of which only one doesn't require an API key (yet). Could be an interesting exercise for the user to build their own applications precisely the way they want them to look and work.

One other media player that may work is GOM Player. That was my player on 98SE for a very long time. I'm just testing it now in a virtual 98SE (updated with IE6-SP1, uSP3) and it is able to play the playlist at iceradio.net posted by you above. No luck with a few default links (shown when selecting Add URL in playlist menu), it crashes in GSF.ax. If it keeps doing that, try manually registering the filter by running regsvr32 gsf.ax in the GOM folder. The version I tried is 2.1.43.5119 from here. Used the full playlist link including the m3u extension; it wouldn't work without it. The skin in the screenshot is called 11 inspirat by CrystalXP, got it years ago, dunno if it's still available anywhere on the web. Oh and apparently Winamp 2.95 can handle m3u URLs too. Tried with the same iceradio.net URL. URLs that use a pls extension return [error syncing to mpeg] which may or may not be due to missing system codecs. I did not (yet) install any A/V codecs in that virtual 98SE.

Oh well, it seems vanilla 98 is quite ill-equipped for such complex task. The 'click me' field should provide some system info, such as the Common Controls version (comctl32.dll) which plays an important part. But the machine code seems to fail too. It's been quite a while since I worked on that code (about three years I think), forgot almost everything. I'll try to look through it, maybe build a special debug version to see what exactly fails. The Unicode change is expected, it's on a timer, and it most likely fails due to missing compatible font. In the mean time you may try a test on an updated system if you got any at hand, such as a 98SE (maybe with SP3 and/or RP9 installed) or ME or XP. I did test briefly yesterday on XP in VirtualBox and it worked as expected for that kind of setup (and yes, Unicode change failed there too as there were no specific fonts installed). Can't do that with a virtual 98 because Oracle don't provide the necessary extensions that would allow a seamless shared connection between guest 9x and host (Linux) system so can't (easily) transfer the scripts for testing. Thank you for taking the time to test and report back. You can look through the example script, change things here and there such as fonts or colors, see how that affects the output (but careful not to break the system). That's how you learn, that's how I learned too. ;)

Oh, my bad for not explaining in detail. CueBanner is a function, a utility that can be included in other scripts. func_CueBanner 2.6.1.ahk is the main function script. updates.ahk is an extension that allows certain variable types implemented in AHK v1.1+ to be recognized by AHK 1.0. All the scripts in the extra folder are subscript modules that act as helpers for the main function script. The folder structure has to be kept as is, no files should be moved. To observe the effect of the CueBanner function there is an example script called example_CueBanner2.6.1.ahk right next to the first two scripts mentioned above. That is the only script that has to be launched. It can be compiled if you want. Unfortunately the effects don't work under Wine, I just tested it. That may be my fault, the Wine installation is kinda broken. The screenshots in the package show a few older versions run under different Windows versions. The idea is that Win9x does not have any kind of cue banners implemented natively, neither in Edit controls nor in ComboBoxes. And it doesn't have the ability to display shadowed text either. With the help of this function one can create AHK scripts/applications that display such elements in their GUIs, just like the provided example script shows. What is a cue banner? It is a string of text displayed in an Edit or ComboBox control when it's empty, providing a hint to its function. You can see an example of fake cue banners in AddTags, the two single-line Edit controls. But that script does not have the CueBanner function implemented, it's just a very early and limited version of it. The shadow/blur part was ripped from Tihiy's Revolutions Pack and includes two machine code subroutines generated at run-time. It's pretty complex stuff. But somehow I knew I could do it. And I did. About Metapad... I find it extremely light, just with a few more useful options available. That's the only editor I used for all of my coding. You may fall in love with it without knowing. :)

Maybe sometimes I make a fool out of myself typing nonsense or using strong language (usually when I'm drunk), but I would never embarass myself offering malicious software. That's why I chose to stick with open-source - no need to blindly trust the author, just check the code and run it as is or compile it yourself. 100% transparency. It's possible that some of the scripts may have been compiled with a more recent, Unicode version of AHK, that's why you get that message. As a rule, names that end in W are Unicode-compiled. An example would be SiBT (StartIsBack Translator) which I built for Tihiy and which requires Unicode in order to create and process language files in various languages. There are many others that have both ANSI and Unicode versions in the same package, because at some point I started using XP increasingly more often, and also tried to keep up with the development and other users at the AHK forums. But wherever there's both versions in a package the script code should be compatible with last 9x ANSI AHK because I always coded on the 98SE machine, and only tested and made corrections when necessary under XP (and sometimes later under 7 for extended compatibility). And yeah, I did put a lot of work in some of them, especially when for whatever reason the outcome in XP/7 was very different than in 98SE, as was the case with CueBanner which in itself is just a proof of concept (have you tried it, does it work for you?) As for Notepad, I always hated it with a passion, for a tiny detail: no toolbar. I needed a handy Save button due to very frequent blackouts in the area. Even though it's about typing, I feel much more comfortable clicking a button than matching a hotkey (such as Ctrl+S) - too many times I hit the wrong combination and something very bad happened. So, very long time ago I found Metapad and stuck with it to this day. Even under Linux I still use it for some of my files. It has its quirks (UTF-8 implementation is incomplete) but I'm too used to it. For true UTF-8/Unicode operations and others that Metapad can't do I use Notepad2 v4.2.25 by Florian Balmer.

Yes, there is the last 9x-compatible AHK version (1.0.48.05) in the package, just in case it gets taken off from the official repository someday. The package is the same as earlier, wasn't sure if the link was still around or working. Whoever downloaded it the first time shouldn't download it again. HotkeyCD is a nice helper tool, most useful if the physical Eject button of the optical unit is defective or hard to reach. One that I worked quite a lot on back then is VolOSD. Not sure if it works correctly under vanilla 98, it's using a few tricks. Actually all my scripts have been developed under Win98SE heavily enhanced with newer system libraries plus KernelEx 4.5.2, so if anything doesn't quite work as intended that might be the reason. Anybody is free to use and/or modify the scripts as they see fit, but please do not use any of them - or anything else built in AHK, for that matter - for malicious purposes.