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Building a fully compatible 98SE computer


Josey

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XCOPY won't work for me. Seems that the XCOPY program isn't on the disk I'm using. 

I'm almost there! :) I've changed the disc drive, the install disc and the hard drive. I think (I'm hoping anyway) it might have been the hard drive that was at fault, as today it wasn't showing up in the BIOS, so I plugged in a 500gb SATA 2.5" hard drive I had. Now it all goes fine to the end of step 3. When I go to run the patches it says something like "Cannot open MSDOS.sys - Rerun command specifying full path to esdi_506.pdr". Is this a known issue, or another odd error?

The other odd issue is that fdisk is seeing the 500gb hard drive as 18gb. I think I might have to order another one. I'm thinking maybe a 120gb SSD, as they are getting very cheap now. Would that work ok?

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You can't apply any of the patches until Windows has completed the first round of setup (unless you manually pre-patch all of the files on another machine and drop the resulting files into the \WIN98 SETUP folder in order to override the ones in the CABs). If you mean Step 3 in the post you made then you haven't run SETUP yet at that point. In order to use a 500GB SATA drive you will definitely need both the SATA and 48-Bit LBA patches in place.

FDISK is known to be limited when calculating disk capacity. Usually it still works fine to partition a drive so long as you set the whole drive as a single partition or specify the partitions by the percentage of the drive to be used rather than by byte count. There are many other tools that can be used in place of FDISK if you wish, so long as you get a proper FAT32 partition created, formatted, and set "Active."

I have no experience with SSD's so I can't advise you there. Note that in order to TRIM it under 9x you will need yet another solution form rloew.

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I managed to do it! In the end I booted into a Puppy Linux live CD and popped the patches on a floppy, and then used the Windows 98 "Start with Command Prompt" option to install them. After that Windows 98SE installed with no problems! I still have to install all the drivers for the soundcard, graphics card etc... and annoyingly I won't have time to do all of that for a few days, but I'm so excited to have got this far. In Windows I can see all 500gb, but I might still think about the SSD, and if I don't get the SSD I'm planing on making some four 125gb partitions.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Yesterday I finally had some more time to work on my Windows 98SE! :) I decided to reinstall with some smaller partitions, and mostly everything went very smoothly.

I ended up using a 256mb nVidia GF 6200 graphic card, which had a driver disc. When trying to install the drivers using the CD the installer failed saying that it couldn't find any nVidia chips in the computer. I then tried the drivers from nVidia's site, but that installer also failed saying something about the PCI ID of the card not being included in the driver. So I installed the driver manually, ignoring a warning from Windows that the driver wasn't made for this card. That seems to have worked. I can get true colour and go up to HD resolutions. Videos seem to play fine. I then tried out a few games to see if 3D graphics were working, and they all played fine apart from Tomb Raider 1 which looked pretty awful (the videos weren't playing smoothly, and the in-game graphics looked almost like Super Mario!). Is this a DOS issue?

I'm having the most trouble with the soundcard. While tidying the house I found a SoundBlaster Live Value (CT4780), so I used that. I've tried about nine different drivers which all claimed to work with this card, and which all didn't in different ways! Some of them seemed to install fully, but no sound would come out of the speakers. Some would play MIDI, but not WAV. Some caused lots of BSODs. In the end I found a driver that made WAV and MIDI work, but it was a newer WDM driver, and the MIDI/Gameport had errors (missing files) while installing, and SoundBlaster 16 Emulation wouldn't install at all. I'm guessing that's why when I tried Tomb Raider 1 again only the music played (no sound effects, or audio during the videos).

I'm thinking about trying a different soundcard...maybe a CT4620 or a SB0060? Has anyone on here tried these cards?

Apart from that I'm very happy with the install.

Thank you everyone for all your help getting me this far.

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If you use WDM driver, you may need to install 269601USA8.exe for better compatibility.

If you tried VXD driver first, you can use CTZAPXX.exe to uninstall VXD driver before installing WDM driver.

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20 hours ago, Josey said:

Yesterday I finally had some more time to work on my Windows 98SE! :) I decided to reinstall with some smaller partitions, and mostly everything went very smoothly.

I ended up using a 256mb nVidia GF 6200 graphic card, which had a driver disc. When trying to install the drivers using the CD the installer failed saying that it couldn't find any nVidia chips in the computer. I then tried the drivers from nVidia's site, but that installer also failed saying something about the PCI ID of the card not being included in the driver. So I installed the driver manually, ignoring a warning from Windows that the driver wasn't made for this card. That seems to have worked. I can get true colour and go up to HD resolutions. Videos seem to play fine. I then tried out a few games to see if 3D graphics were working, and they all played fine apart from Tomb Raider 1 which looked pretty awful (the videos weren't playing smoothly, and the in-game graphics looked almost like Super Mario!). Is this a DOS issue?

I'm having the most trouble with the soundcard. While tidying the house I found a SoundBlaster Live Value (CT4780),

I'm thinking about trying a different soundcard...maybe a CT4620 or a SB0060? Has anyone on here tried these cards?

Apart from that I'm very happy with the install.

Thank you everyone for all your help getting me this far.

For the GPU, i recommend the inofficial driver. I've been using all of GF6 and 7 types, on PCIe and AGP, and they all work (but with manual installation, as the setup.exe of the inofficial driver is ... not working as desired very often...) . GF6200 is the lowest of their kind. I recomend the 7600 GT, as it ist fast enough for anything i can throw at it on W98SE, (and needs no extra Power-connection if used as a PCIe-card). I personally use a GF 7900GTX PCIe with 512MB Ram with help of RLoews driver-patches on two machines, and a GF 7900 GT AGP 512MB (again RLoews patches) on another.

I use the SoundBlaster Live 512 PCI with the original drivers from Creatives homepage with no problems, but prefer the Audigy PCI or Audigy 2 PCI (as they work better with W10 on Dual-Boot).

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10 hours ago, Josey said:

Thanks guys. I'll try 269601USA8.exe first. Where can I download it?

Here's a link.

Notes from MDGx on this fix:

Quote

Microsoft Windows 98 SE WDM/USB Audio Driver WDMAUD.DRV 4.10.2223, KMIXER.SYS 4.10.2223, PORTCLS.SYS 4.10.2223, SBEMUL.SYS 4.10.2223, SYSAUDIO.SYS 4.10.2223, USBAUDIO.SYS 4.10.2224 + WDMAUD.SYS 4.10.2226 Fix:
Direct download [374 KB, English].
MUST install current Drivers for your particular WDM/USB Audio device BEFORE installing this Fix!
Example:
Crystal sound cards require Driver 6.13.10.4140. OLDer ones do NOT work!

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hello again everyone,

Sorry it's been so long since the last update. I haven't been able to spend much time working on it lately.

I reinstalled Windows and installed the CT4670 using the Liveware 3.0 driver CD.

Mostly it works better now. Skype now works and most games/software made for Windows 95/98 work, but DOS sounds still don't work at all. :( Also Audacity won't open anymore (if I try to open it I get a BSOD saying something about the soundcard driver crashing). I might try the Liveware 2.0 driver CD when I have time, but for now I'm pretty happy. Everything I want to work works, apart from DOS sounds, but there's always DOSBOX for that. But when I have a bit more time I'll try other drivers and might try a different soundcard at some point.

Thank you everyone for all your help! I love having a working Windows 98SE again. :)

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