Modern motherboards which are working with Windows 98 (discussion)

[dspear]

I haven't used the ECS Geforce 6100SM-M V1.0, but see the Customer Review by 'electrical-warehouse' at

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Motherboard-Geforc...t/dp/B000OBTSW6

This is available in the US, for instance, at http://www.outletpc.com/c3504.html for $59.95

If you are having trouble with Win98 with over 512MB of RAM, see

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;253912

[matthiaspaul]

Hi all.

One of the reasons for running Windows 98 SE on new hardware is the best-possible support for DOS as well as driver support for older or special hardware, especially in the industrial / embedded world. However, often, old special purpose hardware does also require an ISA slot, which has become a rare gem on modern mainboards.

Personally, I run DR-DOS 7.08 and Windows 98 SE (besides a host of other operating systems) on a Commell P4LA Rev D BIOS 2.1 industrial mainboard, equipped with Core2D E6600 SL9S8 2.4GHz and 4x1 GB RAM.

http://www.commell.com.tw/Product/SBC/P4LA.HTM

- Intel 945G PCI-Express chipset & ICH7R chipset (RAID + Matrix storage support)

- CPU Intel Core2D, Pentium D, Pentium 4, Celeron D (no EE editions) with 800/1066 MHz FSB, LGA 775 socket

- lots of BIOS config settings

- 4x 240-pin DDR2 533/667 RAM slot for up to 4 GB of RAM (of course, Windows 98 SE can only use a fraction of it, but still)

- 1x 16-bit ISA slot

- 4x 32-bit PCI slots

- 1x PCIe slot 4x

- 1x PCIe slot 1x

- 1x PCIe slot 16x

- Onboard VGA (Intel GMA 950) with 224MB shared memory (no driver support for Windows 98 SE, so only standard VGA resolution under Windows)

- PATA: 2x EIDE/ATAPI UDMA100 devices or a 40-pin DOM (disk-on-memory)

- SATA: 4x SATA-II (modern OSes support all 6 channels simultanously, whilst only up to 4 of them can be used under Windows 98 SE. I'm quite confident that - with a little bit of tweaking - all six channels could be made work in DOS and thus in Windows 98 SE as well, although most probably not at full speed.)

- Marvell E8053 Yukon Gigabit LAN (DOS and Windows 98 SE drivers exist, but I could not get 7.14.1.3 to run so far, so I use an Intel PRO 1000 GT PCI Gigabit LAN addon card. For me, the Yukon driver either hangs or crashes during Windows startup.)

- Audio Realtek ALC880 HDaudio with S/P-DIF (no DOS and Windows 98 SE drivers exist to the best of my knowledge.)

- 1x 32-pin DIP JEDEC DiskOnChip socket

- 1x CF-Card slot Type II

- 8x USB 2.0

- 5x RS232, one of them configurable as IrDA

- 1x RS232/422/485 port

- 1x LPT incl. ECP/EPP

- 2x FDD (up to 2,88 ED disks, but without 3mode support)

- 1x PS/2 keyboard

- 1x PS/2 mouse

- 8x user programmable digital I/O ports

- configurable hardware watchdog

Since no Windows 98 SE drivers exist for the GMA 950 onboard graphics (or at least I could not find any), I installed an ATI All-in-Wonder X800XL PCIe DVB-T/PAL 256MB (100-714502) graphics card into the PCIe 16x slot. I think, this video card is one of the latest, for which Windows 98 SE drivers are still available: Catalyst 6.2 as of 2006-02-09. This driver suite officially supports only the Radeon 9800, 9700, 9600, 9500, 9200, 9100, 9000, 8500, 7500, 7200, 7000 and Xpress 200 series (incl. All-in-Wonder variants of them). However, it also provides beta support for the Radeon X850, X800, X600, X550 and X300 series (but not for the All-in-Wonder-variants of them). Trying to install these drivers, the automatic installation will detect an "incompatible card", but if you install the drivers manually, it is still possible to use the video card in all resolutions, with dual monitor support and as 3D graphics card. So far, I was not able to get the TV Tuner running, and the driver for the Remote Wonder Plus remote control causes a non-fatal protection fault at startup.

http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/de/98me...onaiw-98me.html

In regard to 945G chipset driver support. Intel does not officially provide Windows 98 SE drivers for them, but manually installing assorted generation 8xx drivers from various packages, I was able to find working drivers for most components. Only very few yellow "!" can be found in device manager:

- Other components:

-- ! PCI card

-- ! PCI RAID controller (not essential for operation, see below)

- Audio, Video, Game controllers:

-- ! ATI WDM TV Tuner (I still have some hope to get it working)

- System components:

-- ! PCI standard ISA bridge (secondary) [the primary PCI standard ISA bridge works] (not essential for operation).

EDIT: With the updated Intel drivers from http://windows98.ic.cz it now shows up as: "Intel® 82801GB/GR (ICH7

family) LPC Interface Controller - 27B8". The yellow "!" did not vanish, however...

- Universal serial bus controllers:

-- ! ATI RemoteWonder Plus (I still have some hope to get it working)

Since RAID works on BIOS+hardware level, having no RAID drivers for Windows 98 SE is not much of a problem, unless someone would need maximum harddisk performance. In my case, my focus is more on reliability. Therefore I use RAID 1 for redundancy, and only a small section of the drive matrix as RAID 0 (for cache files). Recommended harddisks for RAID are Western Digital *YS RE2 SATA harddisks, where the 15s read timeout can be disabled using the TLER utility. In case there would be a RAID fault under Windows 98 SE, one would require another operating system such as Windows 2000 or XP in order to rebuild the RAID. However, basis setup does not require any drivers or tools at all and can be done from within the BIOS.

I hope this information may help some people to find a mostly DOS and Windows 98 SE compatible modern, flexible, and highly reliable industrial grade mainboard with support for PCIe, PCI and ISA at the same time.

Greetings,

Matthias

Edited September 23, 2007 by matthiaspaul

[dspear]

have anyone tried ASRock ALiveSATA2-GLAN with win98 ?

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=ALiveSATA2-GLAN

it seems to be allmost the same as ASUS M2V

(but "K8T890 CF" instead of "K8T890" ?)

According to the review at http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/mainbo...m2v-k8t890.html

"ASRock ALiveSATA2-GLAN is based on the same K8T890 chipset as the system board being examined in this article [Asus M2V]. Taking into consideration that the two companies are more than related, one may wonder why they would release models that are similar"

[Rjecina]

It has been ulmost 6 months from first MBO list and now is time for new list because many things has changed.

AM2 Motherboards for Athlon 64 and Sempron which can work with Windows 98 SE:

ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA (chipset nvidia 3). This is old AGP type of MBO which is having Windows Vista logo. Users will be without sound in Windows 98 SE if they do not buy sound card

Gigabyte MF3 (chipset nvidia 3). FSB of this MBO is only 800. Because of that Semprons will work 100 % OK but Athlon 64 which needs FSB 1000 will work 20 % lower of what is possible.

MSI K9MM-V (chipset Via K8M800) is old AGP type of MBO.

Foxconn K8M890M2MA-RS2H (chipset Via K8M890). This is PCI Express MBO !! She can work with Windows 98 SE only if we use integrated GPU on MBO. This GPU is having direct X 9.0 support and motherboard is having Windows Vista logo.

ECS K8M890M-M (chipset Via K8M890). Similar like Foxconn version.

Windows 98 SE drivers for all this MBO will be needed to download from chipset producers sites.

Links are:

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...mp;SubCatID=164 for K8M890 GPU

http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...&CatID=1110 for all Via chipset

http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_win9x_4.27.html For Nvidia 3

Next month I will write something similar about Core 2 Duo motherboards

[Rjecina]

Amazon is selling new motherboard on which Windows 98 SE is working. This is:

MSI K9MM-V

Link is http://www.amazon.com/Motherboard-U-atx-Du...1996&sr=8-1

I have not expected to find new Windows 98 SE MBO on Amazon

[vick1111]

Reading this forum I understand that windows 98 can work on :

Asrock 775Dual-VSTA

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Mode...al-VSTA&s=n

Even if I was not able to find this motherboard in local stores. (Italy)

Can anyone tell opinions if windows 98 could possibly work also on:

Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Mode...l-SATA2&s=n

This motherboard that can be more easily found and supports Sata2.

What kind of problems there are with Sata 2 and windows 98?

Thank in advance to everyone that can help and thanks especially to the ones that already did put very good information on here.

[xrayer]

My current mobo running Win98SE (and DOS, XP, Debian, ...)

Asus P5LD2

-support for Core2 CPU (newer revisions), I use E6400@2,4GHz

-PCI-E/PCI

-intel 945 + ICH7R

-additional onboard IDE ITE8211 = up to 6 PATA devices! (fully utilized by 3 optical drives, 2 HDDs, 1 ZIP 100MB)

-4 DIMM slots (I use 2x512MB DDRII 667MHz in dualchannel)

I managed to install Win98SE without serious problems. I installed official drivers for ITE8211 IDE, Marvell Yukon LAN, modified drivers for nVidia 7600GS PCIE, unofficial USB2.0 drivers included in nUSB 3.0 & 3.2, modified intel INF files. In device manager left only one unknown device called "motherboard resources" but it's OK. I didn't tested SATA yet (currently have all on PATA) and I don't use onboard sound because of better SB Live!

Remaining issues:

-SB emulation driver doesn't work under DOS and Win98 (only possibility for dos games is some kind of emulation - DOSBOX, VDMSound (XP), DOSEMU (Linux))

-Windows 98 hangs during shutdows process (bad combination with nvidia) and I have to use restart and shutdown manually

-This crap boasts with overclocking features but it have very bad behavior when FSB exceed about 320MHz, then on all restarts the system is going power off and on within 2 seconds which I belive doesn't prolong life of HDDs. But I fixed this issue by HW-modding - I inserted an asymmetric delay circuit in PSON ATX supply signal to avoid shutdowns when signal goes high shorter than 2 sec.

[Rjecina]

Yes 4CoreDual-SATA2 will work with Windows 98 SE but you will need to have look very good about GPU.

In my thinking this MBO is maybe having problem GPU. I do not know if problem is with Nvidia or ATI.

In the end this will not be your problem because you will buy is shop PC with MBO and GPU and then they will connect that. If it is not working then this will become shop problem (they will need to change GPU)

I think that best possible GPU which is supporting Windows 98 SE is Nvidia GeForce 6 series (Nvidia 6x00) because it is using pixel shader 3.0 . Other possibility is ATI Radeon 9550, 9600 or 9800 (they support only pixel shader 2.0). They all must be AGP or you will have problems

You will need Windows 98 SE drivers for your 4CoreDual-SATA2.

here are chipset drivers: http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...&CatID=1110

here are IDE-SATA drivers: http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...mp;SubCatID=143

here are sound drivers: http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...mp;SubCatID=104 (I think that this will not work ??) It will be best to buy separate sound card which is supporting Windows 98 SE

I have writen here links for drivers because they are not on ASRock site.

[bizzybody]

This isn't the latest and greatest of boards, but the MicroStar MS-6378 runs 98se very well. It's a Socket A, takes PC133, ATA100, built in sound, video, ethernet, USB. I have one with a Duron 900 and it runs 98se very well.

The only strike against it is it has no AGP slot and stupid Windows sees the onboard video even when it's disabled in BIOS. Can't actually disable it, but choose zero for the frame buffer, and it has a (!) on it in device manager when set to zero.

[modicr]

Hello!

Here is an interesting new "dual" mb for AMD Phenom X4/X2 from ASRock

based on NVidia nForce3 250 and NVIDIA (ULi/ALi) M1695

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=ALiveDual-eSATA2

http://www.asrock.com/news/show.asp?id=113

It supports both PCIe x16 and AGP 8X!

Does nForce3 250 chipset work ok with Windows 98 ?

Roman

Edited November 20, 2007 by modicr

[Rjecina]

Yes Nvidia3 is working with Windows 98 SE without problem, but soundcard on this MBO will not work (in Windows 98SE).

To tell truth I think that there will be maybe problems with Uli1695 but it can work because here is download for Uli1695 and Windows 98 SE

http://www.nvidia.com/page/uli_drivers.html

Can you latter write if everything is working OK ?

[billtodd]

I've been running Win98SE off and on (I use Win2K more often) on an ECS NFORCE3-A with nForce3 250 chipset for several months with no problems. But I just got a Foxconn 6150BK8MC-KRSHN2 with GeForce6150B/nForce430 chipset and can't find any nVidia support for Win98 there, so would appreciate any pointers (the fact that the ECS 6100/nForce405 board discussed earlier supports Win98SE would seem to suggest that some support might exist).

Thanks,

- bill

Edit: I hadn't found MDGx's description of his tweaked 82.69 driver when I posted the above, and now see that it claims to support the GeForce6150 - but it doesn't mention 6150 with nForce430, while it does mention the nForce4xx support in its 6100 list. So I'm wondering whether I'll still need Win98SE drivers for the non-graphics features of the chipset (disks, LAN, etc.): if they're not included in the 82.69 package, anyone know if they're available elsewhere?

Thanks again,

- bill

Edited November 28, 2007 by billtodd

[Rjecina]

You need to find nForce430 drivers because it is southbridge. I want to say that nforce430 is controling SATA-PATA hard drive and DVD, sound card and other little things. GeForce6150 is controling "only" communication with CPU.

Short version is you must find drivers for nForce 430.

I do not believe that this drivers for Windows 98 SE exist but ....

[modicr]

Hello!

Can you latter write if everything is working OK ?

I will - I do not have that mb (yet) ...

In the meantime, I was able to install Windows 98 SE on

Gigabyte 8I945GZME-RH. It has Intel chipset 945GZ and

the southbridge is ICH7 (82801GB). Because there is

no driver for onboard graphics, I put in PCI GeForce 6200.

OTOH, has anyone installed Win98SE on

Intel 965 motherboard (with ICH8) ?

Finally, there is an interesting (cheap) ABIT board with

new P35 Express chipset and old ICH7 instead of ICH9

southbridge - IP35V:

http://www2.abit.com.tw/page/en/motherboar...ODEL_NAME=IP35V

http://www.digitimes.com/print/a20071203PD202.html

... makers have employed several strategies including

the use of the older ICH7 southbridge on their P35

motherboards which is against Intel's official

specification ...

IMHO this one could be compatible with W98SE ...

Cheers, Roman

[diskless]

What about the cheap Intel D201GLY?

I think there are Win98 drivers for the northbridge, southbridge, VGA, LAN and audio (non-Intel chipsets), but I don't know whether they work for sure.

More details here:

http://www.logicsupply.com/products/d201gly2

http://download.intel.com/products/motherb...201GLY2/tps.pdf

Edited December 6, 2007 by diskless