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Auto-Patcher For Windows 98se (English)


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I'm not sure about Mike Lin's StartupCPL, but Codestuff Starter definitely allows enabling/disabling the said service with a single click. Key name is SysTray and value is a class string followed by stobject.dll. Not to be mistaken with key name SystemTray and value SysTray.exe, which is Windows' default system tray.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hey soporific,

Two new updates to test/add.

See MDGx's topic post and then my response: http://www.msfn.org/board/98-FE-98-SE-upda...225#entry744225 (posts 1031 and 1032)

Still going well, in fact Windows 98SE has not gone so well before!

It actually seems faster... Maybe it's just in my head?

cheers for this, i should get a new version out soonish, i promised it but other projects caught my attention more. I shall rectify this pronto.

Autopatcher (feb 2007 final) seems to go on an infinite loop when it installs IE6

I wouldn't be surprised! Auto-Patcher wasn't any good until the June 2007 SP2 release :whistle: but, my dear friend, there have been many many releases since that version, why haven't you uprgraded? Is it purely the download size? Use a download manager that has a resume function. If not, please grab the December 2007 final edition and see if you have any problems with that.

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Soporific, I'm sorry about my mistake, i meant to say DEC 2007 Final....my mind was somewhere else :P

but the problem is the same, it seems to be stuck at installing Internet Explorer 6...

Could VMware 6 be the reason? (I'm testing the Autopatcher in a virtual machine)

Edited by amocanu
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:hello: Excuse me,I want to know if the Auto-Patcher has viruses.Because my Dr.Web found that the files "TTFpack.exe, V_Studio.exe, DXM9X.exe, HHUpd.exe, IE933566.exe, kb886677.exe, kb918144.exe, kb920670.exe, kb923689.exe, kb925454.exe, kb926247.exe, kb927779.exe, kb929969.exe, oleup.exe, riched9x.exe, servic9x.exe, w98mp10.exe"all have the same virus called "BackDoor.TerraBit".Can you tell me if my Dr.Web had made a mistake ? :lol:

I'm glad you added that last emoticon because you already know the answer don't you?

Dr. Web ... never heard of it ... AP has been going for about a year and i've never had a complaint about possible viruses ... so going on that, i think Dr Web is having you on !!!

Hi Sophorific - just to let you know - STILL -Dr. Web (a very respectable virus detection program) Counterspy (another) are still flagging several known malware and virus - that seem to come from auto-patcher, (as the fellow who posted the above indicated). I assume it's false positives. but, perhaps these vendors should be contacted in some way to be made aware of these being legit - so this issues will be put to rest.

The ones that were found on my machine were:

NICRMD.EXE -BACKDOOR.TERRABIT (LISTED BY BOTH ABOVE PROGRAMS AS KNOWN MALWARE)

MAINCODE.BAT

START_ME.BAT

START_DEBUG.BAT

You are probably already aware of all this and maybe it's even been addressed here.

Sorry if I'm addressing something old or thats been solved.

Mikey

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Soporific, I'm sorry about my mistake, i meant to say DEC 2007 Final....my mind was somewhere else :P

but the problem is the same, it seems to be stuck at installing Internet Explorer 6...

Could VMware 6 be the reason? (I'm testing the Autopatcher in a virtual machine)

Yes, definitely possible --- i used VMs all the time to test out my projects and i get all sorts of weirdness that isn't there when i check on a real machine. Please, only reports from real machines.

Hi Sophorific - just to let you know - STILL -Dr. Web (a very respectable virus detection program) Counterspy (another) are still flagging several known malware and virus - that seem to come from auto-patcher, (as the fellow who posted the above indicated). I assume it's false positives. but, perhaps these vendors should be contacted in some way to be made aware of these being legit - so this issues will be put to rest.

The ones that were found on my machine were:

NICRMD.EXE -BACKDOOR.TERRABIT (LISTED BY BOTH ABOVE PROGRAMS AS KNOWN MALWARE)

MAINCODE.BAT

START_ME.BAT

START_DEBUG.BAT

You are probably already aware of all this and maybe it's even been addressed here.

Sorry if I'm addressing something old or thats been solved.

Mikey

Mikey, you're encountering a growing problem where perfectly legal files are being flagged by who knows and they are suddenly flagged as being suspicious. It is a complete and utter waste of time for all concerned. If this is isn't a good example of the insanity of capitalism, i don't know what is.

eg. NICRMD.EXE (i think you meant NIRCMD.EXE) -- is made by a great friend of freeware developers called Nir Sofer and here's where you can download NIRCMD.EXE -- http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html

MAINCODE.BAT, START_ME.BAT, START_DEBUG.BAT are my babies. They are simply text files that have the extension .bat meaning they are executable. And for this crime, they are labelled as malware. This really sucks! I refuse to waste time with these issues. Thanks for listening.

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Soporific, I'm sorry about my mistake, i meant to say DEC 2007 Final....my mind was somewhere else :P

but the problem is the same, it seems to be stuck at installing Internet Explorer 6...

Could VMware 6 be the reason? (I'm testing the Autopatcher in a virtual machine)

Yes, definitely possible --- i used VMs all the time to test out my projects and i get all sorts of weirdness that isn't there when i check on a real machine. Please, only reports from real machines.

Hi Sophorific - just to let you know - STILL -Dr. Web (a very respectable virus detection program) Counterspy (another) are still flagging several known malware and virus - that seem to come from auto-patcher, (as the fellow who posted the above indicated). I assume it's false positives. but, perhaps these vendors should be contacted in some way to be made aware of these being legit - so this issues will be put to rest.

The ones that were found on my machine were:

NICRMD.EXE -BACKDOOR.TERRABIT (LISTED BY BOTH ABOVE PROGRAMS AS KNOWN MALWARE)

MAINCODE.BAT

START_ME.BAT

START_DEBUG.BAT

You are probably already aware of all this and maybe it's even been addressed here.

Sorry if I'm addressing something old or thats been solved.

Mikey

Mikey, you're encountering a growing problem where perfectly legal files are being flagged by who knows and they are suddenly flagged as being suspicious. It is a complete and utter waste of time for all concerned. If this is isn't a good example of the insanity of capitalism, i don't know what is.

eg. NICRMD.EXE (i think you meant NIRCMD.EXE) -- is made by a great friend of freeware developers called Nir Sofer and here's where you can download NIRCMD.EXE -- http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/nircmd.html

MAINCODE.BAT, START_ME.BAT, START_DEBUG.BAT are my babies. They are simply text files that have the extension .bat meaning they are executable. And for this crime, they are labelled as malware. This really sucks! I refuse to waste time with these issues. Thanks for listening.

Thanks for the prompt response and explanation.

I don't think 'capitalism' has much to do with the mis-diagnosis, as Dr Web is a Russian program :sneaky: .. but I agree, a lot of these 'anti-virus' people tend to flag anything they don't recognize or are suspicious of, without fully researching.

As I suggested , maybe you should send them a memo of explanation on these flaggings, so that this issue is put to rest once and for all.

I fear that down the road , you (and your wonderful Auto-patcher) might be blamed for 'problems' that your program didn't cause, because of these false positives.

It would be terrible to see all your hard work get a public beatdown, based on a false perception.

just sayin'

Mikey

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The false positives are dealt with by most virus detections manufacturers once users inform them of the problem. Some scanners allow ignoring, some automatically delete them and inform the user, some automatically delete them and don't tell the user or tell them after the fact. I like the ones that say there's a bad thing here and give you options as to what to do with them. Often you can let it quarantine them and then afterwards restore them from the quarantine folder.

So the best thing to do is to report these to the manufacturer of the software. Sometimes they'll remove them from the definitions if they agree it was false.

I don't think it's a problem with programs like Auto-Patcher using stuff that gets detected by virus scanners that aren't the major ones like McAfee, Norton, AVG, Avast, Bit-Defender, etc. Especially if they are things run during the running of Auto-Patcher. Virus scanners should be disabled from running at startup when using Auto-Patcher anyway, since it will reboot many times before finishing. Just turning them off doesn't help if it will reload upon Windows startup. With Avast, I need to go into the Resident Shield options and in Advanced turn everything to disabled at startup. Once done with Auto-Patcher I go back in and enable them all. I used to do similar with McAfee.

By the way, I installed the integrated Windows Vista Service Pack 1 DVD replacing 98SE just to check out Service Pack 1 and also the recent unofficial Audigy 2 ZS Vista Support Pack done by a guy on the Creative forum (an updated version -I installed the missing pieces afterwards using his Revision 2 Cd). So my 98SE is gone for now. :( I'll get it back on VMWare soon I suppose. The Auto-Patcher had everything updated great though! Sorry to say goodbye for now to 98 again.

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yeah, my post was suggesting to Sopo that he might want to waste a few minutes submitting the info to the programs that are showing the false positives.

Once one or two get it and stop flagging them, the others always seem to pickup up the info (funny how that works).

My concern was that his great program might get falsely blamed for some crazy SHlT if he doesn't preemptively act and notify some of these vendors.

Edited by MikeyHunt
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Good point! Someone, at least, should report the false positives.

I recall that the RyanVM Windows XP Post Service Pack 2 Update Pack and RyanVM addon changed a few programs included in it and ways of installing stuff to stop being detected as bad things by most spyware programs, not that they did any spying.

They were just long standing tools that unfortunately could also be used for bad stuff even though they weren't in this case. He just took out the tools and installed stuff a bit differently.

That was a few years back and I forget the names of the programs, but he was quite interested in the problem you're talking about and took his own action to prevent a bad reputation.

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

I'm playing around with 98SE on Virtualbox in Linux again, so I was wondering what was happening here as well. It's still not as good for 98SE as VMWare but I don't have the Workstation for Linux version and $189 is kinda hard to budget for. I'm not sure if my older hardware can use Server or not, and I'd prefer Workstation anyway. Qemu confuses me, so I'm seeing if Virtualbox can be tinkered with enough to get me some better performance. Sun just put out their first version of it so that's what I'm trying.

I installed December Full without some of the stuff since upgraded over time and will install those individually I suppose. One thing that takes absolutely hours to finish is that DotNET installation. On VMWare it's just like on a real system but on Virtualbox it takes a LONG time. I'm just trying stuff like the new SB16 ISA audio card in Virtualbox, that appears to increase Virtualbox performance over the normal Intel sound chip. No Midi, since there's no real SB16 midi chip to address and the mpu401 doesn't install, and isn't supported by emulators anyway. The Intel softsynth works, but not well, so I don't miss much by using the SB16 instead. I'm gonna try installing either (or both) the Roland VSC1 or the Yamaha YXG-50 soft synths and see whether my old games will be able to use them as drivers as they can on a real 98 system. I removed the extra stuff the SB16 Creative cd (from my real SoundBlaster 16 Wave Effects retail box, same driver) puts in autoexec.bat because that's for dos and Windows midi I think, and the dos sound doesn't work anyway. I'll just be using Windows games in there. The Blaster line stays as the driver puts it back even if I edit it out, but doesn't start TSR's like the config.sys Devices they have that run the Creative dos stuff.

But the SB16 instead of the Intel is a bit zippier. I also removed the ACPI support from the virtual machine. When I loaded the ACPI Bios device in Windows it caused the mouse and keyboard devices to conflict so I figured I'd try the old Standard PC way. So I just leave the Advanced Power Management (which is also shown as not working properly) instead of switching it to ACPI Bios and power off the machine from the program since Windows can't fully shut down when that isn't working properly. But that's better than the mouse and keyboard having problems.

Virtualbox is REALLY not designed to get all the devices working perfectly in 9x Device Manager. VMWare does that perfectly. They just virtualize the hardware for the modern NT systems and we're lucky 98 works at all. Nice of them to include the new SoundBlaster 16 ISA emulation as that does play smoother and uses less resources for some reason. You'd think the AC97 Intel chip would use less than a ISA card, but go figure. Not sure what'll happen when I add a midi soft synth to the running audio stuff. At least the SB16 works out of the box as 98 has the driver for it. The update on the Creative cd (or the similar downloaded update from Creative) is essentially the same driver, but adds those autoexec.bat lines, recommends the config.txt stuff it installs to its folder be added to config.sys (the ones I tried and removed later when dos sound didn't work anyway), and includes all the Creative software, the mixer, Wave, midi players, you know, the old Win 3.1 SB16 audio deck type software working on 98. Kinda cool. Realtek doesn't include that stuff with its Win95 VXD AC97 driver I had used for the Intel chip that 98 doesn't have a driver for. So now I have the fancy Creative players and mixers to play with.

I get really slow OpenGL support with the Scitech 7 beta video driver as long as Direct X is updated. Nice addition by using Scitech that even VMWare doesn't offer with its tools. Kinda weird seeing glxgears spinning around on Windows! But 2D works nicely.

Web browsing was too slow with the older configuration, but we'll see what happens since the audio driver switch and the Standard PC instead of ACPI. I also changed the Ethernet card to the older PCI one they added. Maybe that'll work better than the one designed for higher bandwidth that was the previous default. It's good Virtualbox added some choices. There's another one for Vista as Vista doesn't have a driver for the previous default. They include a separate driver for a manual install, but just switching the machine to use the Intel Ethernet card makes Vista internet work out of the box. Don't see myself emulating Vista though. But now there are choices of 3 cards so maybe one of them will increase the speed to be acceptable for web browsing.

This is the first time I installed the full Virtualbox instead of OSE, so I'll see if that new Maximus-Decim NUSB update will get USB 2.0 working so I can use my printer and gamepad. That would be cool. They work fine in VMWare with the NUSB drivers.

Since I nearly never boot into Vista, I'm trying to see if I could just have only Linux installed and virtualize 98SE on it. If I can get 98 working okay on Linux this way I could just wipe out Vista and only run Linux. I really don't use anything but older 98 era Windows software on Windows anyway, doing just about everything in Linux. I have the newer stuff installed in Vista, but never boot into it to use it. Windows 98 running gives me a nostalgic smile. Windows Vista running gives me a headache. :) I'd have room to virtualize either XP or Vista if I did that, without the hassle of dual-booting. Now, the whole big 250GB hard drive is sitting with Vista taking up space. Or, just use the 120GB drive Linux is on for a real 98SE and put Linux on the big drive and just virtualize XP or Vista. Probably XP since I only have a gig of RAM and I don't see Vista virtualizing well with 512MB. XP would do fine.

But, yeah, what's up Soporific? You okay? I check back here every so often and don't see posts from you lately. Hope everything is all right with you! Don't care about the Autopatcher as long as you're doing okay. :) (But a freshening of Autopatcher would be nice if so.)

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Personally I've built a couple of test machines out of scrap, because testing in virtual environment will never yield reliable results as opposed to real stuff. So no reason for me to waste time.

How expensive could be a Pentium I mobo with a 200MHz CPU and 64 MB of SDRAM, for such tests?

As for much newer hardware... that'd also be better to test for real, especially in terms of drivers compatibility and availability.

My ¢2 worth of an opinion...

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