Geforce 6/7 and 8 AGP/PCI-E Driver Edition for Win98/ME by Zak!

[T.N.G.O.G.]

9 series? I highly doubt that. I think 8 series is the lastest. But nobody has confirm that the 8 series work. I said i wasn't going to buy anymore PCI cards, but i may still do that and see just does a 8 series card work for it. There is only one driver that supports the 8 series tho and that is the 82.69 and i highly doubt that it works perfectly for videos and gaming, i think some sort of problem may arose.

I am not buying any pci cards anymore tho, unless i come across those Albatron cards, which i will buy just for testing.

[ZakMcKracken84]

Its reup, see first post.

Edited February 22, 2017 by ZakMcKracken84

[pangoomis]

There's no GeForce 8 support for 98SE, period!

GeForce 8 series uses Unified Shaders, there's not Unified Shaders GPU driver for 98SE period! Not from AMD, not from NVIDIA, not from S3,VIA, whatever! No Unified Shaders support, period!

The best GPU for 98SE is the 7900 GTX, which will work with your modded drivers. From AMD, it's the Radeon X850 XT PE, using official drivers. Note that both don't use Unified Shaders, it's not a coincidence

Edited February 24, 2017 by MrMateczko

[98SE]

On Friday, February 24, 2017 at 10:29 AM, MrMateczko said:

There's no GeForce 8 support for 98SE, period!

GeForce 8 series uses Unified Shaders, there's not Unified Shaders GPU driver for 98SE period! Not from AMD, not from NVIDIA, not from S3,VIA, whatever! No Unified Shaders support, period!

The best GPU for 98SE is the 7900 GTX, which will work with your modded drivers. From AMD, it's the Radeon X850 XT PE, using official drivers. Note that both don't use Unified Shaders, it's not a coincidence

Have you already tested some 8 series nVidia video cards to confirm this?  Which models did you test?

What affect do these Unified Shaders have on the functionality in a game?  Can you still run some low end games that weren't taxing the 3D side of things without issues?  Starcraft 1 seemed to be very low spec to test.

There is a 7950 GX2 which should beat the 7900 GTX.  Seems to be a link discussing this.  http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/203362-33-7900-7950-which-better  I'm working on testing if something higher than an ATI X800 series will work in 9X/ME.  I'm trying to mod some of the drivers for testing it out later.  It took several hours to compare 2000 and XP differences.  It might be possible to backport some of the graphics cards for Windows 2000 that only had XP drivers.  As for the Voodoo 5 5500 weren't there some DOS or Windows games that made use of it that the nVidia graphics cards didn't or couldn't?

Edited June 20, 2017 by 98SE

[pangoomis]

Many people tried 8 series on 98SE, all of them failed. ALL! I don't need to do tests, they have already been done, google them.

Unified Shaders are a fundamental architecture change that sticks with us to this day. Drivers have to be rewritten to support them to even get to the desktop.

There must be a reason NVIDIA gave up on 98SE support after the 7xxx series, I think it's this one.

If you want to run low end games that do not use Direct3D, Glide or OpenGL at all, rather depending on DirectDraw and software rendering (if possible), VBEMP is all you have. I ran UT99 on VBEMP using software renderer under 98SE.

98SE cannot use multi-GPU chip cards. They will only use one of them. 7950GX2 has two GPU chips. A single one of them is equivalent to a 7950GT. And a 7950GT is slower than the 7900GTX. Therefore 7950GX2 is slower than 7900GTX. Look here: http://oc-esports.io/#!/round/osibs_s2rb

Could you try the Radeon X1xxx series? They do not have Unified Shaders, but don't have 98SE drivers, not many people tried them under 98SE, could be interesting.

[cov3rt]

6 hours ago, MrMateczko said:

Many people tried 8 series on 98SE, all of them failed. ALL! I don't need to do tests, they have already been done, google them.

Unified Shaders are a fundamental architecture change that sticks with us to this day. Drivers have to be rewritten to support them to even get to the desktop.

There must be a reason NVIDIA gave up on 98SE support after the 7xxx series, I think it's this one.

If you want to run low end games that do not use Direct3D, Glide or OpenGL at all, rather depending on DirectDraw and software rendering (if possible), VBEMP is all you have. I ran UT99 on VBEMP using software renderer under 98SE.

98SE cannot use multi-GPU chip cards. They will only use one of them. 7950GX2 has two GPU chips. A single one of them is equivalent to a 7950GT. And a 7950GT is slower than the 7900GTX. Therefore 7950GX2 is slower than 7900GTX. Look here: http://oc-esports.io/#!/round/osibs_s2rb

Could you try the Radeon X1xxx series? They do not have Unified Shaders, but don't have 98SE drivers, not many people tried them under 98SE, could be interesting.

^i agree with pretty much all the things you said, besides, why use a power hungry card like the 7950gx2, even if it was possible to have support for both gpu chips, it would run hot and use a lot of power. heck, i would rather use something like a 7600 gt instead of the 7950gt. it would definitely be nice if someone were to get modded working drivers for the radeon x1xxx series as you can have a cooler running lower wattage chip compared to the older chips. 

[98SE]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2017 at 1:21 PM, MrMateczko said:

Many people tried 8 series on 98SE, all of them failed. ALL! I don't need to do tests, they have already been done, google them.

Unified Shaders are a fundamental architecture change that sticks with us to this day. Drivers have to be rewritten to support them to even get to the desktop.

There must be a reason NVIDIA gave up on 98SE support after the 7xxx series, I think it's this one.

If you want to run low end games that do not use Direct3D, Glide or OpenGL at all, rather depending on DirectDraw and software rendering (if possible), VBEMP is all you have. I ran UT99 on VBEMP using software renderer under 98SE.

98SE cannot use multi-GPU chip cards. They will only use one of them. 7950GX2 has two GPU chips. A single one of them is equivalent to a 7950GT. And a 7950GT is slower than the 7900GTX. Therefore 7950GX2 is slower than 7900GTX. Look here: http://oc-esports.io/#!/round/osibs_s2rb

Could you try the Radeon X1xxx series? They do not have Unified Shaders, but don't have 98SE drivers, not many people tried them under 98SE, could be interesting.

I'll see what I can do.  I am going to test out the X800 first and then if it works in the Z77 I will try to modify the drivers and test on the X1550 I have.  But I also have a 8500GT that I planned to use for a hackintosh test so I could try and see if 98SE works or not.  I examined the code difference for 2000 and XP.  So at worst I could experiment back porting some of the XP only drivers to 2K for testing on some of these older ones if 98SE can't use it.

[98SE]

On Tuesday, June 20, 2017 at 8:14 PM, cov3rt said:

^i agree with pretty much all the things you said, besides, why use a power hungry card like the 7950gx2, even if it was possible to have support for both gpu chips, it would run hot and use a lot of power. heck, i would rather use something like a 7600 gt instead of the 7950gt. it would definitely be nice if someone were to get modded working drivers for the radeon x1xxx series as you can have a cooler running lower wattage chip compared to the older chips. 

I wouldn't use that card directly in my system.  I thought if the card itself could be dumped and video card emulated somehow you could then create two of these working in a virtual Quad-SLI which would blow away the GTX 7900 model without the overhead heat and wattage.  I've been studying the older 98 drivers and from what I can tell the x800 might work and there's a small chance the x1550 could work as well if they are close enough in generation.  I personally hate the heat these cards made and the fan noise so that would be a bonus using an X1XXX on 98SE.  Any comparisons between GTX 7900 vs top end X1XXX?  Assuming both of these are the best modified cards for 98SE.

Edited June 23, 2017 by 98SE

[rloew]

Extracting the ROMS from nVidia Cards is easy but I don't see how much help they will be as they only provide PnP and DOS support.

[pangoomis]

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-2000-display-driver-model-design-guide

"If you want to create a display driver for Windows 98/Me, you can use the WDK documentation that released with Windows Vista. You can obtain the WDK for Windows Vista RTM from the Microsoft Connect website."

I've managed to get a hold of one. But there is not documentation for 9x! Lying bastards! Guess it's time for 98 and 2000 DDK's to take a look at.

[rloew]

You need the DDK and documentation for the Video Card itself. I have not seen much documentation on the nVidia Cards.

Even Linux source code provides little information. They use a proprietary module from nVidia to provide the low level interface.

[98SE]

On Thursday, June 22, 2017 at 7:27 PM, rloew said:

Extracting the ROMS from nVidia Cards is easy but I don't see how much help they will be as they only provide PnP and DOS support.

It would be used in a 9X/ME video card emulator or if possible for XP and W7 might be a better choice removing the whole issue of Ramdrive and memory necessity to be DOS based.  There is no way I would consider this for DOS.  The memory overhead and the fact most graphics cards and iGPU should still work in DOS it's the sound card PCI emulation that you need to worry about if you're doing DOS games.  XP and W7 should cover those issues.

Edited June 24, 2017 by 98SE

[98SE]

2 hours ago, MrMateczko said:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/display/windows-2000-display-driver-model-design-guide

"If you want to create a display driver for Windows 98/Me, you can use the WDK documentation that released with Windows Vista. You can obtain the WDK for Windows Vista RTM from the Microsoft Connect website."

I've managed to get a hold of one. But there is not documentation for 9x! Lying bastards! Guess it's time for 98 and 2000 DDK's to take a look at.

That would be beyond what I would be invested to do.  You need someone who either worked for nVidia or graphics cards during the 9X/Me generation.  I think the best is a video card and sound card emulator for 9X/ME to work in XP to make a 98WINBOX emulator.

[JohnSmith0815]

Thank you very much for the drivers!

It works with my winfast 7600gt agp and xfx 7600gs agp on asrock 75i65g with 1gb ram and ram patch.

But it doesn't work with my asus 7900gs agp, I only get resolution 640x480 and 16 colors, when I increase any of the settings I get bluescreen and nwiz.exe and explorer.exe stopped working even with 512mb ram. In Win XP it works fine without any problems also in games.

Do you have any idea why my 7900gs doesn't work but the other two cards work?

They all have 256mb vram.

[schwups]

ZakMcKracken's doesn't support all graphics cards. Check the inf file for your 7900GS (Device ID). Or try Maxim Decims 82.69 driver (MDGX).