So are you using Windows 98 for your old games /vr/?
Do you have an actual machine or emulating it? What is your setup?
I am currently looking to get my hands on a Windows 95/98 computer, preferably a laptop or small desktop. I only want to play DOS games and 2D Windows games like Diablo, Starcraft and Simcity and stuff so I don't think I need any fancy Voodoo cards or anything like that.
How much chance do I have of finding one at my local car boot sale? On the one hand I'd expect 90's computers to be super common and dirt cheap these days, but on the other hand I'd also expect them to be fairly hard to find as most people probably assume they're completely worthless and either keep them in their attic or have thrown them out already.
It seems like ordering online is always going to cost more for computers because they're heavy and therefore cost a lot to post.
>>3004579
>maze screen saver
So fucking mad this was never made into a game
>>3004836
These mini computers look interesting
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MICRO-COMPUTER-PC-800MHZ-FOR-WINDOWS-98-XP-128MB-SSD-RS-232-MS-DOS-GAMES-SPIELE/321917272116?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D34859%26meid%3Dc91951ea93c84dd8a6a8368974035cc1%26pid%3D100005%26rk%3D2%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D321867220749
Yep. The ones that aren't more easily played in DOSBox, at least. Grabbed all the best working stuff I could find out of my basement and put it all together, resulting in some weird frankenputer that isn't exactly period-accurate, but it works well enough. Specs:
>case/base machine
HP Kayak XA workstation
>CPU
450MHz Katmai Pentium III, upgraded from 350MHz Pentium II
>GPU
64MB Geforce 3 Ti 200, upgraded from some useless S3 card
>RAM
512MB SDRAM, don't remember original amount
>Storage
4GB HDD for OS/drivers/etc, 40GB HDD for games
CDROM and DVDROM drive, DVDROM currently defunct (reads CDs just fine, doesn't know what to do with DVDs)
>Sound card
Creative Sound Blaster AWE32, replacing some weird Aztech card
>Monitor
Viewsonic A90f, 1024x768 @ 100Hz
>Input
IBM Model F AT with PS/2 adapter
Logitech Marble Mouse USB
>>3004872
> Logitech Marble Mouse USBI'm usong it right now
>RAM 512MB
Shouldn't Windows be unstable at this point?
>>3004893
I thought 1GB is the point where Win98 becomes unstable.
>>3004579
>Shuttle MK35 v1.0a
>Athlon XP 1800+ 1.53GHz
>512 MB
>MSI FX5700U 128MB AGP
>>3004846
I almost got one of these Win98/XP machines, but /vr/ convinced me otherwise. It was cheaper to get the parts and build it myself. The card was about £6 and the motherboard came with the cpu and ram, and that cost £18 (both from ebay) I had the extra parts lying around. I probably could have done better with the price, but I was getting fed up with trying to get dosbox and VM to work (always hit an miss). You have to think about how you will install 98. I'm just trying to remember correctly (I am still inexperienced in running 98) but you need some kind of boot disk (correct me if I'm wrong). I had no floppy drive at the time, so I had to find a boot disk to run from the CD! That took far longer then I liked. After hours of trial and error, I finally had Windows 98 running! Now I can finally play The Dark Eye. Some games like Monkey Island 3, crash constantly, making it unplayable. That could be a problem on my end, again, still inexperienced. I did grab a unopened copy of Sam and Max Hit the road, for £1.
Look into how those machines handles win98.
>>3004895
It varies. 512MB should be fine in virtually all cases.
Above that and you'll run into file cache bugs that you can fix with ini tweaks, which should raise the ceiling to 1GB in most cases.
Beyond that point things get dicey as you may run into a hard limit with Win98's memory manager. Best I ever managed with just ini tweaking on Win98SE was 1.5GB.
>>3004963
Is there any real benefit in running win98 with 512+ ram?
>>3004968
No.
>>3004968
Not particularly, unless maybe you want to try to use youtube and multiple tabs in Firefox 3.
Only reason I ran 1.5GB in my setup was because it dual-booted XP and having to manually remove memory modules between each boot would have been bullshit.
>>3004974
Makes sense.
>>3004974
If you were to connect a Windows 98 PC to the internet without a firewall these days, would it pretty much get infected with shit instantly with minimal user interaction? Just curious.
What's the memory limit for HDDs on Win98? I want to hook up some extras full of the games I torrented.
>>3004987
Modern malware doesn't work on 98 but that doesn't matter anyway since Windows 9x-era browsers can't display today's websites.
>>3004992
Surely a version of Opera or Firefox from a few years ago would be able to display some websites decently? I think with KernelEx you can run as high as Firefox 10.
I was more thinking under the assumption that there may be Chinese botnet machines trying to flood shit into every IP address at random and that if you were using an insecure system with no firewall whatsoever then they'd be able to do so before you even open up a browser.
>>3004987
You can barely load modern internet pages on older browsers
>Do you have an actual machine or emulating it? What is your setup?
Abit BH6
Pentium-III 1GHz
768 MB SDRAM
Geforce FX5200 AGP + Voodoo2 PCI
Aureal Vortex 2
Intel PRO/1000
USR 56K V.92
120GB SSD w/SATA-IDE adapter
16x DVDRW
Floppy emulator
Multisync FP950 (aka the boat anchor)
Cambridge Soundworks 2.1
Dell AT101W PS/2
Intellimouse Explorer PS/2
CH Fighterstick
Gravis Gamepad Pro
Win98SE w/DOS boot option
I'll need to look for a new monitor eventually. The NEC has to be cranked to nearly full brightness before the picture is bright enough these days.
>>3004991
>What's the memory limit for HDDs on Win98? I want to hook up some extras full of the games I torrented.
137GB, because Win98 only supports 28bit LBA. A larger hard drive will technically be detected, but if you use it then data corruption is inevitable.
It is possible to hack Win98 to support 48bit LBA though.
http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable48bitlba-break-the-137gb-barrier/
However, if you really want to be certain that you won't get data corruption, just find a 120 GB drive.
>>3005034
What motherboard / chipset?
>>3005058
Thanks, I'll stick with 120GB then.
best wallpaper coming through
What, if any, benefit is there to use Win ME/2000?
>>3005001
>>3004987
Someone posted a video of Internet surfing on a 1986 Mac Plus; he had Wikipedia running on it. I think he had a filter or something to disable CSS, video codecs, and everything but basic HTML. It ran and displayed, but it was incredibly slow.
So in theory you could do that, but what's the point since you can't utilize modern Web features anyway and many websites now this trick doesn't even work because they're often comprised entirely of Flash and there's no HTML code at all.
>>3005095
http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/features-issue-sections/12228/mac-plus-modern-web/
Here it is.
>>3005095
yeah it stops you from going to about 90% of webpages you might be able to get text pages and 4chan but not mch else
>>3005098
I can remember majorgeeks.com working well.
>>3005095
In all fairness, the Web didn't even exist in the Mac Plus's time; it was still a few years away in 86.
>>3005102
Which makes it all the more amazing that he got it to work at all. We're talking a computer that was only a bit more advanced than a TRS-80.
>>3005059
>Abit BH6
>>3005076
None
Windows 2000 is like an early version of XP, which is pretty much only useful on machines that are RAM starved.
Windows ME is like a gimped version of Windows 98 SE.
OP is underage. Clearly he does not realize what a tremendously bad, unstable OS this was.
>>3005135
Win98 SE isn't too bad. It supports Real DOS so the backwards compatibility is great.
Sure the Win9x are unstable as fuck by modern standards (an error in one program shits the whole OS up until reboot) but it has its uses, and Win98 SE is the peak of Win9x.
>>3005106
Google Hyperlink 2.5e.
>>3005139
Oh but I have used 98 SE.
>click on menu
>crash
>go on website
>crash
>in the middle of a game
>crash
>load Windows up
>crash
>crash
>crash
>pppfffffffftttttttt.....
I have used everything from 3.1 to W8 and none of them ever crashed as much as 98.
>>3005150
Was this on modern hardware or legacy hardware? Cause it's perfectly stable (for Win9x) on my 100% legacy hardware machine.
>>3005131
>which is pretty much only useful on machines that are RAM starved.
Not so much an issue now that you can throw several gigabytes at it, but when XP came out it ran like dogshit on the common 128-256MB setups of the time. Stark contrast to Win2K, which was happy with just 128, let alone 256.
>>3005150
I had the occasional BSOD but your enthusiasm for hyperbole is noted.
Also Win3 was way worse with the GPFs.
>>3005169
Oh, the fun I had running winXP on 64MB of ram.
>>3004579
I have a Libretto 70ct that I use for shitposting and retro gaming.
Also I got an OLPC and I put WINE on there for good feeling comfy gaming. I have Morrowind and Dwarf Fortress on there.
>>3005152
This was on a Pentium box from 1996, not a modern machine.
>>3005185
Then it may have just been a driver issue.
Win98 is compatible with both VxD and WDM drivers. In my experience, when manufacturers provided both, they ran properly on Win98 with one set and unstable on the other. And sometimes the only way to know which was appropriate was to try them both.
>>3005169
>Not so much an issue now that you can throw several gigabytes at it, but when XP came out it ran like dogshit on the common 128-256MB setups of the time. Stark contrast to Win2K, which was happy with just 128, let alone 256.
XP was pretty much was designed for 512MB. I remember distinctly that Win 2000 was basically NT for people that had less.
What's a little annoying is that with some legacy hardware, like the Intel i815 chipset (year 2000), there's a hard limit of 512MB of RAM. Thankfully it's enough for XP, but a little limiting these days.
>>3005076
2000 has NT kernel, so most old games won't work at all, also no real DOS mode at all.
ME has a fucked up real DOS mode you can fix a bit, but absolutely not worth it and directly can install 98SE for profit.
98 = Almost any Windows Games and DOS games!
>>3005875
>98 = Almost any Windows Games and DOS games!
Some DOS games do have issues with running inside Windows however the only one I can specifically think of is Bubble Bobble (the original Novalogic IBM port from 1989).
>>3005879
For that you can easily let it boot into DOS and automatically run it.
If even this doesn't work, which indeed happens because of too few EMS and other memory, you just make a bootdisk.
>>3005989
>For that you can easily let it boot into DOS and automatically run it
That's the problem - boot into real mode andyou can't access the CD drive or the sound card
If you wanted to run some old CGA/EGA shit with no sound card support of course that's fine.
>>3005994
What's CDRom drivers and sound drivers?
Seriously. It is very easy to get CD rom and Sound card function if you have legacy hardware. You just need to git gud at googling.
>>3006423
The computer I did this on had onboard audio. You're not gonna get DOS sound without a real ISA card. The CD drive was also a 48x unit manufactured in 2000; there were probably no DOS drivers for it anyway (probably no hardware made after about 1996 has DOS drivers).
>>3006558
>You're not gonna get DOS sound without a real ISA card.
>The CD drive was also a 48x unit manufactured in 2000; there were probably no DOS drivers for it anyway (probably no hardware made after about 1996 has DOS drivers).
that's bullshit, my friend
got a motherboard (2001-ish I guess - socket 370) with integrated audio that works quite alright under DOS
also my DVD-ROM (made 2006?) works fine with just a basic MSCDEX setup
>>3005150
>>3006558
>You're not gonna get DOS sound without a real ISA card.
Depends on the implementation. Integrated sound usually exposed an ISA interface for DOS games or had an emulation driver up until XP finally overtook Win9x and NMI/DDMA disappeared from boards.
>there were probably no DOS drivers for it anyway
UIDE.SYS from freedos also works under MS-DOS and supports just about anything.
I found this thing for $3. Someone loved this, all new screws, fancy new ide cables, and was cleaner on the inside than my normal rig that I make an effort to keep clean.
P3 500 mhz, 64 mbyte ram. No hdd or anything in the agp slot.
I already ordered parts for the other 98 machine I plan to rebuild. What should I do with this?
My desktop in 99
>>3004579
Actual machine.
Pentium 120MHz
Intel Advanced/EV main board, pic related
64MB RAM
ATI Mach64 + Voodoo1
2GB Seagate HDD
Much more recent DVD writer, since it's really quiet and works well
Sound blaster 16 (onboard), has a real OPL3
Monitor is a Compaq SVGA, 800x600 max resolution
Generic Cherry keyboard and MS serial mouse
I mostly play DOS and 2D windows games on it.
>>3005135
98 works well if you don't have to rely much on third-party drivers and are using a non-APIC machine.
>>3005150
Sounds like you had a shitty main board.
>>3004997
I have a friend who is a systems administrator working for one of the big military contractors (think Raytheon) who says this possibility is still the real deal. Keep your old systems offline.
As for my own experience, I had a Windows XP system get wrecked when I plugged it into a modem directly and left it running for a day.
>>3007169
Sell it. IBM Aptiva systems are a bit sought after, especially when original/good condition. Or use it as a base for your 98 machine. Can't go wrong with that.
>>3007140
To be honest, I never really needed to run anything from real mode because most all games that had sound/CD support did work fine in Windows. It was just one I tried (Bubble Bobble) that didn't use a CD drive anyway. Plus in real mode you lose some useful features like long file names and faster 32-bit disk access.
>>3008154
Maybe so...
I never had a problem with stuff like LucasArts talkie games running within Windows. I ran Sierra adventures as well and they worked. Some old shit from the 80s might not but that doesn't support sound cards anyway so there's no reason to boot Windows up for it.
>>3008136
Really? My family had an Aptiva that I was actually using as late as 2005 or 2006. Amd K6 350 Mhz Processor, 64 Mb RAM and 8 GB HDD. I didn't even play any games with it, just sluggishly browsed the net. I actually bought a 128 MB RAM comb for it for a few euros which made a huge difference.
I think they threw it away even though it was technically still working. Fug.
>>3008154
There are no good home versions of Bubble Bobble not even the PS1 port. They're all missing things or screw with the game mechanics.
I resurrected my old Win98 SE machine lately, my first computer even. I got my hands on a Canon colour laser printer in good shape, but drivers are only available for win 98/2000/XP, so at the moment I'm using that computer to print stuff. I was even able to set up a network connection to my Win7 main system for comfortable file transfer.
Specs are:
-Pentium II 400 MHz (passive-cooled one from an IBM computer, but with some screws and zip-ties I mounted a fan on it)
-256 MB RAM (I got some more lying around that I found in the trash, maybe I can upgrade)
-NVidia TNT2 Riva 32 MB
-20 GB HDD
It runs Stronghold Crusader fairly well and I think it has Command & Conquer Red Alert still installed, to which I just found the original CDs. Due to the lack of hard drive space I unfortunately uninstalled GTA2, gotta change that soon.
>>3005994
You can let it load the driver's and the configs(an own autoexec.bat and config.sys) for it in the properties where you also tell it to let it boot into DOS. For most you always can copy paste the configs or also set it as default.
No problem at all. Did it all the time back then.
>>3007169
That is a very nice looking machine. You should easily be able to upgrade the CPU in that to 800+ Mhz
>>3005879
There were quite a few DOS games that didn't agree with Win9x. Mostly they were the ones with weird memory managers, like Ultima 7. For those, you just hit F8 while booting and go into DOS mode.
>>3008786
None of the stuff I ever tried anyway but then I mostly ran stuff like LucasArts games and Colonization that were 100% real mode. I do remember that X-COM worked in 98 SE fine however it uses DOS4GW which is a very common, widely supported extender.
If you ran Bubble Bobble within Windows, it would slow down to like 2 fps. I have no explanation as to why a 16-bit real mode game that did not do any funny memory tricks would fuck up like that.
>>3005994
Yes, PCI sound cards don't work nice with DOS mode, but ISA sound cards work just fine, and you should be running a Gravis Ultrasound or an Awe32 anyway instead of the godawful PCI cards with that HORRIBLE MIDI set.
For CD-ROM, as long as you aren't using a separate IDE controller card, Win 9x should add your drivers to your AUTOEXEC.bat when you install Windows. If not, then go into AUTOEXEC.bat and add the drivers. You can also mess with your sound card settings while you're at it.
>>3008818
>Yes, PCI sound cards don't work nice with DOS mode, but ISA sound cards work just fine
The computer I had had only the (presumably PCI) onboard audio meaning no way to get any sound from real mode.
