Modern 98SE Driver Question(s)

[Yushatak]

I'm strongly considering purchasing rloew's RAM patch and putting 98SE on my modern box, it's specs:

Core 2 Quad 3Ghz (I know all existing software will only use one core, don't care, that's fine)

6GB RAM (It should use 4GB with the patch, the other 2GB will be used as a RAMDisk or be ignored)

ATI Radeon 4870 2GB VRAM (Here's where I'm worried.. I could put an older PCI card in I suppose for use with 98SE, but I'd rather not have to have two GPUs)

Audiophile 24/96 Audio (I know this will work, has drivers from Win95 and Mac OS 8.6 up through Win7-64 and Mac OSX 10.5.8 - great card to own)

Gigabyte P43-ES3G Motherboard (ICH10)

Realtek RTL8168D/8111D PCIe Network card (onboard)

Hauppauge HVR-1800 PCIe (not necessary to have working under 98SE)

Linksys 802.11g PCI Wifi card (not necessary to have working under 98SE will remove if I add 98SE anyway)

Silicon Image 3124 PCI SATA controller (has 98 drivers, shouldn't be a problem)

Total of eight physical internal SATA disks.

Voodoo 2 (This isn't in there at the moment, I'll likely replace the wifi with it if I go through with this)

The idea is to dualboot 98SE and Windows 7 64-bit. Win7 for the "serious work" and 98SE for old games, software, and tinkering around with hardware access and programming for old machines.

As I said above, I think the GPU will be the big issue. AFAIK drivers for 9x stopped at the X1950 or so. Perhaps I'm wrong, or perhaps there's some more-generic driver for it? My monitor runs at 1920x1200, but I think that shouldn't be a problem provided a GPU that can handle it under any other OS, as 98 supports widescreen just fine.

I need input on the GPU situation and any other input you might think useful.

Edited March 1, 2011 by Yushatak

[Guest wsxedcrfv]

Unless you're going to get win-98 to work with the P43/ICH10 chipset, I don't know how you're going to get very far using any video card or on-board drive controller.

Is any motherboard beyond ICH5/5R usable under win-98? I think ICH6 was the first Intel southbridge to support PCI express.

[Yushatak]

Well I don't need every HDD to be accessible from 98SE, so I could install it to one on the 3142 controller.

The chipset drivers, in my experience, are only needed for maximum performance, not basic functionality - granted my experience has been with NT-based OSes since 2002 or so, and I'm rusty on 9x - am I wrong?

I've rediscovered Bearwindows's VESA driver, so if I can find a copy of that it would work for video, but I've also read that it has issues with DOS console sessions, dragging windows around, and scrolling up and down in windows, with screen corruption (in the former) and lag (in the latter). However, I imagine that wouldn't work well with DOS games, if it has trouble with DOS consoles, and it wouldn't work well with windows games, as it likely would lack GDI acceleration (for the oldest games, particularly Win3x-targeted ones) and DX/OGL acceleration for the others. OGL acceleration could be handled by the Voodoo, so that's not an issue, but DX and GDI would be missed.. I'm not sure if the acceleration would be necessary, considering the overkill that my card would provide, or if the clock speed and such are irrelevant, given the lack of basic acceleration - however it may then fall to the CPU, and again be fine due to the overpowering speed it provides. It's really hard to judge this with no information to work from but guesswork and the functionality of other operating systems on this and other hardware.

Perhaps one of you who has used Bearwindows's VESA driver could confirm/deny my above assertions/assumptions? Are there some custom ATI drivers for 98 for more modern cards? I know Radeons share a certain amount of hardware with their predecessors, so depending on what material is available it's well possible someone has already created a driver for the HD series. "No PCIe support" though... what exactly does that mean? I don't mean literally, but as a matter of repercussions - Windows 3.x and DOS don't "support" PCI, or PCIe, but they work on them. No acceleration, except generic VESA acceleration, but again, they work fine, and they work plenty fast, even without drivers for a given card, nor the underlying architecture (i.e., PCI bus). As far as I know, on a DOS-based OS, all that matters is BIOS support, and the BIOS obviously understands how to work with the PCIe bus just fine. The question is, then, is Windows 9x far removed enough from DOS that it doesn't rely heavily *enough* on the BIOS and video BIOS to use the card effectively, or does it? I'm afraid that's an area of ignorance for me.

[rloew]

I'm strongly considering purchasing rloew's RAM patch and putting 98SE on my modern box, it's specs:

Core 2 Quad 3Ghz (I know all existing software will only use one core, don't care, that's fine)

6GB RAM (It should use 4GB with the patch, the other 2GB will be used as a RAMDisk or be ignored)

In practice you will see around 3GB of RAM as the last 1GB of 32-Bit Memory Addresses are reserved by the BIOS for Memory Mapped I/O.

The remaining 3GB of RAM can be used as RAMDisk(s) using my 64-Bit RAMDisk Drivers.

I have not found a PCI-E Video Card that works smoothly with Windows 98SE. The few that work at all, crash when you try to shutdown or have problems displaying Videos.

Bearwindows's VESA Driver does NOT work with DOS Boxes so it is not yet a solution.

[Yushatak]

Thank you for your concise response.

How does 98SE handle multiple video cards? If I put a secondary one in, a PCI one, will it still attempt to use the PCIe as the primary? Does 98SE even distinguish primary vs. secondary, etc.? I know 98 was the first version with multiple monitor support, if memory serves, but I never actually used that in it..

If I determine that everything should work fine (chipset/etc.), I'll purchase a later Voodoo and stick that in my box to use with 98SE, and just swap monitor inputs when I want to run 98SE or Windows 7 - assuming that will work..?

Also, will my 2GB VRAM PCIe card eat up 2GB of my 4GB addressing space? Perhaps since it's not being used it would not (might need to be "disabled" in the device manager?)? Rather anomalous variable.

Edited March 2, 2011 by Yushatak

[TmEE]

I had no problems with 3 GFX cards in Win98. I had one card on ISA and 2 on PCI. I had to set jumpers on the cards though so cards would not fight on becoming the "master". On some mobos I could even use onboard video along with PCI or AGP video

Edited March 2, 2011 by TmEE

[schwups]

You find the video drivers and chipset driver here: windows98.ic.cz

Nvidia 82.69 up to NV7950

ATI 6.2 up to X850

I use the ATI Radeon X800XL (256MB) PCIE 16x on an intel 945 chipset (Fujitsu Siemens D2156-A1). The southbridge is ICH7.

And a Nvidia 7600GT (256MB) PCIE 16x on an intel 915 chipset (MSI MS-7058). I shutdown the machine with the PLOP Bootmanager.

USB 2.0 driver from mdgx - not the orangeware

OS Win ME

Only a few members here reported that video cards with 512MB work. A 256MB card should work.

Edited March 2, 2011 by schwups

[Yushatak]

Alright that seems to indicate that not much changed between 98 and XP regarding multi-monitor use and capabilities - that's a good sign.

For the chipset, I can ignore the hard drive controller(s) since I can just use one of the disks on IDE or on my 3124 controller which has 98 drivers. I can ignore the audio because I'm using an Audiophile card with 98 drivers anyway. I can ignore the USB because NUSB can handle the controllers (and in fact must to function, anyway). That leaves PCI Express Root Ports (irrelevant), "Processor to I/O Controller" (should be a performance/efficiency consideration, will work without it).. SMBus controller is for monitoring temperature and voltage of the motherboard - irrelevant. Firmware Hub Device is the BIOS flashing socket, irrelevant. PCI Bridge doesn't need drivers - performance/efficiency concern only.

LPC Interface controller... from what I gather this seems to be any arbitrary serial device (or at least devices that would be serial a decade or so ago, heh) - infrared, TPM, and other "stuff". I'm not sure what it means for my system - mine's a homebrew desktop, as specs indicate. Anyway I'm pretty sure I can live without it, whatever it is.

I might be able to hack together a driver bundle for 9x for the chipset anyway, or at least parts of it. 800 series is supported on 98 and the ICH10 (4 series) is supported in the very next driver which supports 900 series. That's not a huge leap - possibly after INF file rewriting it will work on 98, and/or I can coerce the DLLs and such from the 800 series to work with the 4 series (depends on some stuff I haven't looked at yet).

So here's the plan:

- Rearrange HDD contents to free up space for a 98SE partition.

- Stick PCI GPU in the slot where my wifi is now, for use with 98SE.

- Rewire my internal USB FDD to use a USB header plug and transfer it to the motherboard.

- Remove PCI USB card that is now unnecessary.

- Stick Voodoo 2 where the USB card was.

- Buy rloew's patch for RAM use above 512MB with stability.

- Use .cab version of patch to install 98SE on the partition.

- Install KernelEx, Revolutions Pack, and other fancy third party things that have come out since Microsoft abandoned 9x.

- Use VDMSound for 9x when playing DOS games.

- Enjoy.

- Eventually buy industrial motherboard for my system with an ISA slot so I can add a real SB16.

- Be the only guy with a system that runs both old and new so well.

Edit: I'm considering either splurging on the industrial board I've always wanted or waiting until I do - I've used VDMSound 9x before but reading the thread it sounds much more iffy than I remember - and if I'm stuck using DOSBox to run the games with proper sound then what's the point of being on 9x (other than the fact that I love 9x)? As well, if I get a new board I can try to find a 9x-friendly chipset on it, though there may not be much choice in industrial socket 775 mobos for a 9x-friendly chipset, lol. There were other reasons, though.. *thinks*

Edited March 2, 2011 by Yushatak

[Jolaes]

I've used VDMSound 9x before but reading the thread it sounds much more iffy than I remember - and if I'm stuck using DOSBox to run the games with proper sound then what's the point of being on 9x (other than the fact that I love 9x)?

Eventually, when all old hardware bite the dust, emulation will remain as the only option. Dosbox CVS/SVN builds are pretty much beefed up these days; support multicore CPUs, Voodoo 1 emulation, D3D / OpenGLide output... you name it. Some people run Win95 in Dosbox, too. I tried Taewoong's build in combination with nGilde 0.95. It works really well with a lot of Dos Glide games.

Taewoong's page

nGlide

[Ludwig Von Cookie Koopa]

Have attempted to just plug in an already active version of Win9x into your computer to see what would occur? All the drivers might not work, but it will give you an idea of what needs to be done.