Drugwash

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.

Thank you for mentioning me. I have been working with AutoHotkey for many years and managed to realize its awesome potential. Yes, there are simple ways for creating hotkeys, hotstrings and automation, but AHK (as a shorthand) can do MUCH more than that. One can actually write full-blown applications in this language, provided there is no need for multi-threading, because that is its major weakness: it's single-threaded. In time I've written quite a host of scripts for myself and even though I'm running Linux now I still run some of my own scripts using Wine, because there is no replacement for those in either Windows or Linux world. For those even remotely attracted to programming, AHK is a gem. One can call any and every Windows API through a simple DllCall() command, retrieve a result and so on. Amazing things can be achieved through AHK, if only you set your mind to do it. Admittedly, their forum board may not welcome Win9x questions or requests in this day and age but maybe some answer could be found there some way. Hope you can get my work from this link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fi2iuxaqy3o713n/public_work.7z?dl=1

In my experience with the drives shipped to our country and even with those brought in second-hand machines from western-european countries , WD and Maxtor have been the worst, Maxtor being the absolute worst. I still have piles of them in various drawers. One of the first that brought me to the verge of a heart attack when broke down was an 8.4GB WD. Started 'clunking' continuously and that was it - I lost everything on it, because at the time I didn't have a CD-RW (not to mention a DVD-RW) to save files on discs. A kind soul bought and sent me from the US a 160GB Seagate HDD and a STTH SHS-182D DVD-RW unit. That was back in the summer of 2006. Mounted the two on a Soyo SY-6VBA 133 board given by a friend, installed Win98SE on the HDD, and that machine has since been running 24/7 for about ten years. First three years have been hectic, with dozens of daily reboots - mostly resets, hard reboots - due to crashes and lockups in the Miranda IM alpha software that I was testing at the time, then the machine remained in stand-by for about a year after I moved at the house, before I brought it here and put it back to work, again running 24/7 but this time no more frequent reboots or resets. It did occasionally crash or lock up due to various software or drivers I was testing, but mostly it kept running for 20-30 days in a row. My point is, I was so satisfied with my Seagate drive that whenever my friends came to me to have their systems fixed or upgraded I invariably recommended and mounted Seagate drives, and so far none of them came saying their drives crashed or had other problems. Now I'm not saying they're infaillible or anything - maybe it's been sheer luck or I just wasn't notified of any failures, but so far I don't have a single Seagate drive among the broken ones. I do have one of my first large drives - a 1.2GB Quantum Fireball - that broke after a few years of usage, but that was before Seagate bought them out (same goes for all the Maxtors as well), and I have a twin of that Quantum Fireball that kept working fine until a couple years ago on another machine that I just stopped playing with, so the drive may still be working now after 20 years. So, again, this was strictly my personal experience in more than 20 years of dabbling with computer hardware. None of the above is meant as advertising or anything - just a true story from a different corner of the world. That'd be great. But still can't imagine what could've scared me so much back in 2006 that I chose not to get over 32GB with any of the FAT32 partitions. There must have been a strong reason, because at the time I wasn't one to always play it safe, and definitely didn't have any Win2k/XP at hand that could've artificially introduced that limitation by formatting the drive under such OS. Could it be related to some limitation or bug in Scandisk or Defrag, maybe before some solution was found, such as porting the WinME versions to 98SE? Dunno, maybe it was something that has since been overcome, but still it would be good to figure it out before someone accidentally breaks their system or loses important files after operations such as Tripredacus' cloning that we're talking about, more so when his system is 98FE not SE and therefore it's possible the fix/enhancement may not have been available or installed. See, now I'm playing it safe. Hopefully it's just my paranoia.

Hey Den, nice to see you guys. Yep, direct access is still blocked but luckily there's Tor. I still get e-mail notifications from the board and if there's something I can do to help... Things changed for me; been on Linux for more than a year, memory's getting hazier each day, the world is a mess... Anyway, hope you guys are OK all things considered.

You can use any disk as backup/clone destination, providing it is at least 20GB in size as the original one. If the original disk has more than one partition you can also choose which partition(s) to backup/clone. The cloning application is entirely of your own choice - I merely mentioned an alternative. I believe people should always be aware of all their possible choices. Good luck!

It's been quite some time since my last encounter with any version of Windows but as far as I remember all my partitions on the Win98SE machine were (and still are, just unused) at no more than 32GB. The HDD is 160GB but due to the BIOS limitation on that particular machine it would only read 137GB so I created four 32GB partitions as FAT32 and the rest is an EXT2 partition created with a live Linux. So... if the BIOS on the new machine is capable of 48bit LBA - thus not limited to 137GB HDD - you may have to partition it with extra care, that is no more than four primary partitions, and any partition be it primary or logical should not exceed 32GB. Can't remember why that 32GB limitation exists, maybe somebody else could offer details or link to software that would overcome it, if exists. A very important thing is that you will have to install one of the HDD patches that remove the 128/137GB HDD limitation (there are two of them as I recall, MDGx's page should provide links) on the current setup before cloning and moving the OS to the new machine, if it's not already installed, otherwise you will have problems with files/folders that cross that 128/137GB border. For cloning you may use any suitable tool that you know and trust, or try FoxClone, a free Linux tool specifically designed for this task. Also GParted on a live Linux setup would allow you to extend the original system partition to the full size of the new partition it has been cloned to. Good luck!

I hear you. Been looking for such thing myself for quite some time, with same dissapointing results. If it wasn't for that stupid GDPR I'd still have my CloudMe account and repository (free plan has 3GB storage and 150MB max file size, better than Dropbox). An older version of their client could run on Win98SE/ME using KernelEx and some UPX trick.

Try Dropbox. I didn't trust it back on Windows but now on Linux I guess it's okay. It's not difficult to create an account and copy files to the dedicated folder. Unfortunately a free account only allows 2GB of files, with max 100MB per file using Dropbox Transfer, so we can't store the entire 8GB archive, but it would be enough for any helpful scripts/files/etc. If anyone knows of a better free host that is not time-limited please chime in.

The difference may only be in the wording used to describe the contents. An 8GB archive may well contain over 15GB of files. I did download the 8GB archive but didn't look into it yet*. Judging by the description you posted (Get the full website copy) it may contain the HTML pages, images and everything else besides the actual extension files. There are two main problems in handling such archive: 1. Its size does not allow a Win9x user to download it since it exceeds the max 4GB allowed by FAT32 2. Opening/extracting files from it may require quite a lot of RAM+CPU power, depending on the decompressing application used, and also spare time * Just out of curiosity I now tried to open the archive under Linux Mint (Intel i5 DualCore HT CPU, 4GB RAM) and it's been about 5 minutes before 'opening archive' progressbar got at about 65%. When finished I saw there is a folder structure which ultimately contains hundreds of subfolders in firefox-addons. When fully extracted the real space occupied by the files and folders may greatly exceed 15GB. Right now I have no time and will to extract that archive, not to mention free space on HDD is quite scarce.

You're welcome. Thanks for the explanations. I now tested and DDG (the html version) is also capable of using the site: token, so anti-G users could benefit from this. You could try and add it to the engines list.

Glad to be of help. :) Dogpile: 32x32 PNG 16x16 PNG 16x16 ICO MSFN: no idea! Wiktionary: 48x48 ICO (manual resize needed) Internet archive: 32x32 ICO (manual resize needed) Yahoo: 32x32 ICO (manual resize needed) I don't get the meaning for [3] and [4]. Maybe I shouldn't even try to. :) Happy Holidays to everybody!

There is also a no-js version of DDG which looks closer to the full js version; it is not the same as the lite one mentioned above: https://duckduckgo.com/html/

One more method of editing for those who already have the required setup: in Total Commander if compatible packers are installed one can press Ctrl+PageDown on the selected xpi to open it as a folder, then navigate to desired file, click Edit (or press F4), do your changes, save the file in the editor, close the editor and accept the repacking. Very similar to the 7-zip method above.

Multiple reasons: 1. Trying to preserve HDD's boot sector avoiding repeated (re)boots. My machines have always run 24/7. 2. The 98SE machine doesn't have enough power to run any higher OS decently. 3. The XP machine came with XP already installed and didn't want to mess it up. 4. The notebook is relatively too new for 9x, most drivers are probably unavailable; original 1TB HDD had Win10, replaced it with a 250GB where there's Ubuntu and Mint already. 5. Other reasons...

Maybe you're referring to ScreenGrab? I've been using it in Pale Moon under XP and it's installed in Pale Moon under Linux now too but dunno how compatible would be with 9x. The version I have here (fix version - 0.99.03c) states compatibility with Firefox 4.0 to 49, SeaMonkey 2.0 to 2.47 and Pale Moon 24.0 to 26.

Interesting ideas there. In my scripts package there is one called IEMenuExt, meant to be registered as an IE menu extension. A second script called Browser registration can un/register portable browsers to the system registry. The menu extension should be available in any application that exposes an IE control, such as POP Peeper (a POP3/IMAP e-mail client I've been using), and obviously in IE itself. Right-clicking an URL or an image in such applications would then offer to open it in one of the registered browsers. Moreover, there are options to open a clean URL, that is certain redirections are removed (one is outdated). I believe some of the options in your script could be implemented in IEMenuExt or - more easily, maybe - in the other script that monitors the clipboard. Unfortunately only the sources are there for IEMenuExt, no compiled executables, and it's kinda difficult for me to work with the 98SE machine right now. I may be able to compile with AHK Basic under Linux, but editing the executable to add/replace resources (icons, bitmaps, versioninfo etc) doesn't work - it always results in corrupt files. Also I'm not sure if everything would work correctly under vanilla 98 - I only tested it under the upgraded 98SE with KernelEx. For screenshots I implemented a function in a private script that saves directly to disk in PNG format (using gdiplus.dll APIs) - something that 9x's MS Paint cannot do. Unfortunately not all hotkey combinations I wanted would work in 9x, and another drawback is that tooltips and cursor are not captured.

It's an independent aplication, a compiled AutoHotkey script that runs as any other application and captures the Clipboard operations. When anything is copied to the Clipboard it analyzes the contents and if it matches any of the predetermined patterns it processes it and copies the result back to the Clipboard so the user can simply paste the processed result to a browser's address bar, a text file or wherever they want. That's precisely why I mentioned them. Older versions of those add-ons may be found to work with 9x-compatible browsers or newer versions could be modified for 9x compatibility. Either way, some people may just want to find out about them regardless of their OS version, as they are really useful IMHO.

In regard to URL redirections there's an old Firefox (v10-v23)/SeaMonkey (v2.7-v2.20) add-on called Redirect Cleaner that I've been using for years in Firefox and Pale Moon (slightly modified for the latter to include its ID for v24-v28). Still using it (v2.2.0) in Pale Moon 28.7.2 under Linux Mint. For a long time I've been using QuickJava, an add-on that can enable/disable JS, Java, Flash, SilverLight, Cookies, Images, Animated images or CSS with a single click. It can sit in the StatusBar or in the Toolbar. My current version 2.0.4.1 is available only for Firefox (v20.0-v29) but it works in Pale Moon too, and I did have an older version installed in Firefox 9.0.1 under 98SE. Something very useful to me has been YARIP. It's very powerful so it's easy to make a mistake. It can permanently remove unwanted elements from a web page and it can also alter its aspect through CSS. Current version 0.3.4.2 is available for Firefox v17-v28, Pale Moon v25-v28 (added by me), Thunderbird v17-v28, SeaMonkey v2.20a1-v2.25 and mobile Fennec v17-v28. For such old add-ons there is another add-on called Classic Add-ons Archive (v2.0.1), but this one requires high Firefox versions (v45-v56) or Pale Moon (v27.0-v28), while minimum SeaMonkey version is 2.40. Maybe someone with a dual-boot at hand could install it in a newer OS/browser and download old add-on versions compatible with 9x browsers, then make them available somewhere. I built myself an AHK script that removes certain redirections from URLs, it works by monitoring the Clipboard, so it can work with any browser, e-mail client and pretty much any online/offline documents as long as one can use Copy/Paste. Anybody could build such tool if needed but it does require some programming knowledge.