I’ve installed Windows 98SE on one of my old computers. It doesn't feel like it used to back then. I just can’t take it anymore. No idea if anybody finds this interesting; as so often before it helps me to let off some steam and rant a bit.
Windows 98 installation was everything but straight-forward.
A lot of crashes,“The computer needs to be rebooted" messages and cursing later... Windows 98SE got on latest patchlevel and I could add KernelEx as last addition for using some slightly newer software on the old OS (hopefully tomorrow).
To summarize this: Windows 98SE is a horrible thing to get running – despite it is holding a lot of nostalgic value for me. A borked automatic driver installation “Search for the best driver automatically (recommended)” almost trashed the installation. Maybe I've forgotten how to do things correctly the Win98 way.
If there is any interest – contrary to my expectations – I can upload some photos of the machine and some screenshots.
Thanks for reading. I think I’ve calmed down now. Blogging can be helpful in this regard.
Edit:
Nice to see I'm not the only one still interested in experiments with old operating systems:
https://gbatemp.net/entry/gbatemp-on-windows-98.19221/
Meanwhile I've installed Windows 98SE on another computer as well. Taking inspiration from above blog entry, I hooked up an ethernet cable on the old computer to see what result Opera 12.02 can still achieve when trying to access GBAtemp. If anybody knows a better/newer browser still working with Windows98/KernelEx, I'd be happy to know. It seems newer Firefox versions can be used with Kext and some additional DLLs but I never got into looking for the details. Firefox only worked up to about version 10 with KernelEx.
My screenshots:
OpenOffice:
Opera with GBAtemp:
It seems usable. The PC is soooo slow and some graphics are missing. The browser is pretty outdated... and I won't try to login.
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-5AX rev 4.1
CPU: AMD K6-2 450MHz
RAM: 384MB SD-RAM (I don’t have any 256MB PC-100 SD-RAMs to max it out)
GPU: ATI Rage Pro (see the other spoiler below)
Adaptec AHA-2940 (Ultra-)SCSI controller with 8GB HDD, 1.2GB HDD and HP C1533A DAT/tape/streamer connected. Sadly I don’t have any media for this thing.
Realtek RTL-8139 based network card
C-Media CMI-8738 based sound card
CPU: AMD K6-2 450MHz
RAM: 384MB SD-RAM (I don’t have any 256MB PC-100 SD-RAMs to max it out)
GPU: ATI Rage Pro (see the other spoiler below)
Adaptec AHA-2940 (Ultra-)SCSI controller with 8GB HDD, 1.2GB HDD and HP C1533A DAT/tape/streamer connected. Sadly I don’t have any media for this thing.
Realtek RTL-8139 based network card
C-Media CMI-8738 based sound card
Windows 98 installation was everything but straight-forward.
- The setup program complained about the HDD not being prepared for Windows (old Debian installation) but offered to do it (create Windows partition).
- After seemingly doing so and a reboot the setup failed formatting with FAT32. Why? What now?
- Manually starting fdisk of course! This made me facepalm. I don’t know if and how this can be reproduced: The secondary, small 1.2GB hard disk had an 8GB primary partition defined and the main 8GB HDD had no partitions at all. What the f…, Windows Setup?
- After manually correcting this, the setup worked.
A lot of crashes,“The computer needs to be rebooted" messages and cursing later... Windows 98SE got on latest patchlevel and I could add KernelEx as last addition for using some slightly newer software on the old OS (hopefully tomorrow).
To summarize this: Windows 98SE is a horrible thing to get running – despite it is holding a lot of nostalgic value for me. A borked automatic driver installation “Search for the best driver automatically (recommended)” almost trashed the installation. Maybe I've forgotten how to do things correctly the Win98 way.
Win98 even crashed when changing the graphics card!
I went through my old stuff and found a ATI Rage 128 with 32MB video RAM which is much better than the one that was in that computer. This was a good idea in another sense: The ATI Rage Pro is an interesting graphics card with additional memory in what looks just like a SO-DIMM (laptop RAM):
As already mentioned, swapping the graphics card made Windows go blue screen. I seriously had to start safe mode to remove the old graphics card from the device manager. After a reboot in normal mode, Win98 came up in full VGA glory, 640x480 with 16 colors… and the ATI driver installation failed because the the graphics card still didn’t show up in device manager. Another reboot later it did show up and the ATI software worked. That is one of the situations when choleric little Sinchen starts tearing her hair out.
I went through my old stuff and found a ATI Rage 128 with 32MB video RAM which is much better than the one that was in that computer. This was a good idea in another sense: The ATI Rage Pro is an interesting graphics card with additional memory in what looks just like a SO-DIMM (laptop RAM):
DAMN!!
When it takes that much time to get a graphics card working. I’m just not used to that! Maybe this is the reason why it was called “Plug and Pray” sometimes.If there is any interest – contrary to my expectations – I can upload some photos of the machine and some screenshots.
Thanks for reading. I think I’ve calmed down now. Blogging can be helpful in this regard.
Edit:
Nice to see I'm not the only one still interested in experiments with old operating systems:
https://gbatemp.net/entry/gbatemp-on-windows-98.19221/
Meanwhile I've installed Windows 98SE on another computer as well. Taking inspiration from above blog entry, I hooked up an ethernet cable on the old computer to see what result Opera 12.02 can still achieve when trying to access GBAtemp. If anybody knows a better/newer browser still working with Windows98/KernelEx, I'd be happy to know. It seems newer Firefox versions can be used with Kext and some additional DLLs but I never got into looking for the details. Firefox only worked up to about version 10 with KernelEx.
My screenshots:
OpenOffice:
Opera with GBAtemp:
It seems usable. The PC is soooo slow and some graphics are missing. The browser is pretty outdated... and I won't try to login.