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(failed) Ryzen and Fall of the Roman Empire... sort of...


ragnargd

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  • 6 months later...

Because of the server crash, nearly four months of my posts were lost.

I solved the Optical Drive problem with my AHCI Driver for Windows 9x and it is now generally available.

I have also written an AHCI CD/DVD Driver for DOS. The AHCI.SYS Driver from HP only works on some Intel Systems.

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  • 1 month later...
On 6/7/2018 at 1:05 PM, rloew said:

Because of the server crash, nearly four months of my posts were lost.

So I've read. I haven't been posting much lately, so I missed out on most of it.

On 6/7/2018 at 1:05 PM, rloew said:

I solved the Optical Drive problem with my AHCI Driver for Windows 9x and it is now generally available.

How much?

On 6/7/2018 at 1:05 PM, rloew said:

I have also written an AHCI CD/DVD Driver for DOS. The AHCI.SYS Driver from HP only works on some Intel Systems.

Excellent! Where can I get it? Is it free, or paid?

I'm curious, much effort, it seems, has been put into getting 98 installed on a modern AMD-based machine, but what about a somewhat older Sandy Bridge PC? I'd imagine it's more possible than with a PC with an AM4-based CPU (or whatever they're called nowadays), but still anything but straightforward (at least there's full support for XP, and probably 2000 :) ).

c

Edited by cc333
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That information is on my website.

There is information about Intel based Motherboards in other threads. This particular thread started with a particular AMD CPU.

My AHCI Driver software has been tested on Intel Motherboards such as the H110. Look earlier in this thread for details.

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  • 1 year later...

I've successfully ran Win98SE on a friend's PC with Ryzen CPU (Ryzen 5 1600 IIRC) a long time ago.

It was on an ASUS PRIME B350-PLUS motherboard.

Same deal as with any other modern motherboard - HIMEMX is all you need :)

I do not recall doing anything fancier than that.


With the now publicly available RAM patch and the AHCI driver it is even easier.

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HimemX or Burnmem are obvisious.

Are somewhere some details, about bios settings and what is working and what not?
Because Ryzen MB probably does not have IDE mode, was some additional Sata controller used? Are rloew Sata / AHCI drivers working? Its possible to install vanilla Win98 SE iso (+HimemX fix in middle of install) or some mods were needed? 
Or installation was just copied from other machine?

Was sound working with additional PCI or usb sound card? 
What about networking, stability?
Videocards are interesting too.. i have problem no more modern Intel board with its completly ignoring Gen1 PCI-E videocards, was it working with Ryzen?
Where games working, or just 2D with generic Vesa drivers?

There are lots of interesting details...

Edited by ruthan
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It was some time ago so I do not remember all the details well.

BIOS settings - umm....don't think I've touched on anything (apart from the obvious thing of enabling CSM). I did flash the latest UEFI though at that time.

No USB since everything is tied to the USB 3.0 controller. You can either use a PCI-E x1 USB 2.0 card (but mine causes problems with NVIDIA 82.69 and the AHCI drivers so it's not reliable), or hope that the UEFI has a PS/2 compatibility mode, which it did I think. No networking since the Realtek's chip was a newer revistion not supported by the 98SE driver...I think I've tried the NDIS2 driver with no luck. 7900 GTX did not work (black screen, probably due to the PCI-E x1 USB 2.0 card or the motherboard itself. The friend pulled up a different (much slower) 7000 series GPU and it worked fine (even with dual monitors).

I think I had the AHCI driver by that point, but either way, using the AHCI driver fixes all problems with non-existing IDE mode. Windows 98SE will first boot with the default 16-bit disk access compatibility mode without any mode. Then you install the AHCI driver (one of the PCI Card unknown devices) and you get full 32-bit Disk Access.

As for installing 98SE on modern systems (or any system that can into USB booting actually) - I'm using Rufus to make a CSM MS-DOS (not FreeDOS!) bootable flash drive, then copy 98SE setup files and FDISK/FORMAT from here (no-ramdrive): https://www.allbootdisks.com/disk_contents/download/me.html Then I boot from the flash drive and use the FDISK with the /ACTOK switch to make it possible to set the hard drive (which is the second drive in FDISK, the first one is the flash drive) as active. After setting the partition size with the % symbol (more reliable than typing exact size, and makes it easier to work with bigger than 127GB hard drives), I FORMAT it, and copy (manually) the system files (command.com, io.sys, himemx.exe, 98se setup files, other patches, etc.) to the hard drive. Then I boot from the hard drive and proceed with the installation as normal.

The FDISK/FORMAT will take a LONG time depending on the size of the hard drive, but it has been the most reliable way of installing for me. Best bet is to stick to 128GB SSD's :)


No sound, except for using a USB Sound Card, but my PCI-E x1 USB 2.0 card causes problems :( Don't think we've tried a PCI sound card (the motherboard has a PCI port, that's why the friend chose it)

As for stability, I think there were only those random freezes I can't figure out. Sometimes system works for hours, sometimes it will freeze after a minute.

With that 7000 series GPU he had (dunno the model, maybe a 7600 GT) I had success installing the 82.69 drivers, so games worked fine.

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