Revisiting Windows 98SE

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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.
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

Windows 98 installation was everything but straight-forward.
  1. The setup program complained about the HDD not being prepared for Windows (old Debian installation) but offered to do it (create Windows partition).
  2. After seemingly doing so and a reboot the setup failed formatting with FAT32. Why? What now?
  3. 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?
  4. After manually correcting this, the setup worked.
Having a naked Windows is not enough. So… installing hardware drivers, Internet Explorer 6.0SP1, Windows Media Player 9, dotnet1.1 SP1, dotnet 2.0, unofficial Win98 SE service pack, universal USB mass storage driver and some more.
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):
01.jpg
02.jpg
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.
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:
01.png

Opera with GBAtemp:
02.png
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.
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Comments

Alexander1970
Thank you for this Interesting and very cool Report,Sinchen.:yay:
(Except the ALI Chipset - very uncool...Hehehe....:rofl:)


In Theory Windows 98 SE can support up to 1 GB Ram (and all cachable depending to the Chipset/L2 Cache).
But maybe the Size of your RAM (more than 512 MB) CAN maybe cause "Issues":

If a computer contains more than 512 megabytes (for example, 768 megabytes) of physical memory (RAM), you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

You may be unable to open an MS-DOS session (or command prompt) while Windows is running. Attempts to do so may generate the following error message:

There is not enough memory available to run this program.
Quit one or more programs, and then try again.

The computer may stop responding (hang) while Windows isstarting, or halt and display the following error message:

Insufficient memory to initialize windows. Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your Config.sys and Autoexec.bat files, and restart your computer.
Click to expand...
 
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Alexander1970
If more than 512MB of RAM is installed,Windows can assign all of the Virtual Addresses (incorrectly) to Vcache.
This will result in Out of Memory Errors.
Maybe using an upper Limit on the File Cache using MaxFileCache in System.ini.
 
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Alexander1970
Also found this Note:

EXCEPTION No. 3: For systems with more than 1 GB of RAM, the defaults in Windows 98 or ME can cause continuous rebooting of the computer, or to hangs or serial reboots during the Windows upgrade process. To resolve this problem, add a MaxPhysPage=40000 entry in the [386enh] section of SYSTEM.INI. This effectively limits the amount of RAM Windows can access to 1 GB. (Microsoft limits ths recommendation to systems having more than 1.5 GB of RAM, but the solution is to roll it back to 1 GB. See {MSKB 304943}.) Microsoft has now flatly stated that, "Windows Me and Windows 98 are not designed to handle more than 1 GB or RAM. More than 1 GB can lead to potential system instability."
Click to expand...
 
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CMDreamer
And that's why a Windows reinstallation ass something that had to be done by a computer literate, or else... BSOD!

Nowadays, you just restore your computer using Windows and you're set, everything should work, unless it doesn't. LOL!

But Windows has evolved making things easier for the masses... and that's something good and bad, depending on which side of the equation you are.
 
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Jayro
...Are there any driver managers that work with Windows 98? Last I checked, most didn't even support XP anymore. I think Snappy Driver Installer Origin might still work, since it's interface and whatnot is basically just HTML stuff. But I don't have an old machine or VM of 98SE to try it on.
 
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tech3475
Tried installing this on my Ryzen laptop using VMWare….turns out AMD has some dodgy microcode (or something) so the installer crashes.

I might make a retro rig some day but I’m not sure if it’s worth it for the odd game I’d play e.g. Discworld Noir.
 
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mrgone
Who remembers 98lite?
a great tool with much more options what NOT to install
it could even downgrade the "integrated" ie4


Also: ATI with integrated Hardware-MPEG-decoder for the win!
 
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KleinesSinchen
@alexander1970 There are some unofficial patches for allowing Win98 to use more memory. Not tested them (not needed -- why install Win98 on a more modern computer that will easily run XP?)
@CMDreamer What do you want to say? Am I too stupid to install an OS on an old computer?
@Jayro I'm not a fan of "convenient" automatic driver tools (which are 99% adware). I have been told about SDI shortly before this blog and it looked very promising. Open source, no adware and somewhat trustworthy. Then I found out it wants to download (and upload) the driver packages with Torrent which is a deal breaker for me.


Thank you all for the comments!
 
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K
There is in fact a patch available now to allow Windows 98SE to use more than 512 MB of RAM safely. It used to cost money, but then the author died. Fortunately it is preserved:
https://archive.org/details/PATCHMEM

Not that this is particularly relevant, since M. Sinchen's machine has much less than 512 MB.
 
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Jayro
I remember back in the XP days we would nLite our installation discs to see just how small, yet still functionally working, we could get XP to be. Glory days. NTLite doesn't offer nearly the same amount of customizations, and is also now a paid product.
 
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