W98SE with Patcher9x + Patchmem

[martinambrus]

Hi guys

I just arrived to the realm of Windows 98 SE, and so I found this website which was extremely helpful so far!

While trying to make W98SE run on VMWare on an Intel 11 i5 core Lenovo notebook, I came across the excellent genius W98 work of Rudolph Loew - specifically his Patchmem program which allows me - in theory - to use the whole of my possible <= 4GB RAM.

However, since Intel 11 processors behave in a way which breaks even the W98 installation process towards the end, I had to patch the VMM.VXD file through another excellent work called Patcher9X.

Unfortunatelly, these 2 patches are not compatible - at least from what I could find by trial and error.

When I apply the patcher9x patch first, I cannot apply patchmem from rloew anymore, since it doesn't recognize the VMM.VXD file (i.e. it recognizes it as an invalid file).

If I try to apply patcher9x after an installation with patchmem already present (such as this next excellent W98 re-build here), I'll always end up with the system saying it doesn't have enough extended memory and shutting down on me.

There already is an issue opened with patcher9x requesting inclusion of Rudolph's patchmem code which is yet to be answered by the patcher9x author.

So, my question is - would there perhaps be someone here who is capable and willing to give us a helping hand, so the rest of us can still enjoy the W98 experience on our modern Intel 11 processors?

Thanks in advance for reading this post- it's my first.

I'll be grateful for any response or pointer if this patcher9x-patchmem combo has already been solved elsewhere.

[jumper]

Use FC/B to compare the original with each of the patched files. If there is no overlap in the patches, I have a little utility that can combine the three files.

 

[martinambrus]

Hi jumper, and thanks for the generous offer! As I don't have any experience with "fc /b" and the ouput was rather intimidating for me, I'm attaching links the 3 VMM.VXD files I got from my virtual machines. I hope you could make some sense of it and possibly use your tool to combine them? I have to attach these 1 by 1, since I'm only allowed to attach 512kb of data maximum.

Edit: sent you a private message with those files, as they are copyrighted and cannot be shared here

 

Edited February 22, 2023 by martinambrus
copyrighted content removal

[martinambrus]

*censored*

Edited February 22, 2023 by martinambrus
copyrighted content removal

[martinambrus]

*censored*

Edited February 22, 2023 by martinambrus
copyrighted content removal

[jumper]

fc /b original patched1 > patch1

fc /b original patched2 > patch2

Then view patch1 and patch2 side-by-side and check for overlapping addresses.

 

[martinambrus]

Thanks jumper, I tried this and unfortunately, there are overlapping addresses.

Upon further inspection, the VMM file patchmem generates is smaller and very different from the original VMM.VXD file. So, I guess there's a lot of rewriting and packing going on which would prevent the much simpler patcher9x file to be compatible in any way.

But it was worth a try