I have tried to install Windows 98 SE on PC with 915GM Speedster-FA4 motherboard made by MSI and I'd like to share my experience and ask if anybody got better results with motherboard based on Intel 915 series chipset.

What are the items that need driver.

915GM + ICH-6 chipset.
This is officially supported in version 6.3.0.1007 of Intel INF Update Utility.

USB 2.0 controller
- Without any driver, all 8 USB ports are fully functional in USB 1.1 mode, I tried OrangeWare driver (version 2.04.0.0) that is necessary for motherboards with ICH-4 and ICH-5 southbridges, everything looked fine, USB2 EHCI controller was found, USB2 hub was found, usbview utility shows USB2 controller+hub with 8 ports - but it is not switched to USB2 mode.

SATA/PATA disk controller
It contains standard ATA100 interface suitable for connecting of two PATA devices (HDD, CD-ROM) and SATA controller for connecting upto 4 SATA devices. It can be switched (in BIOS) into three modes:
1. Disable SATA. In this mode just PATA devices are recognized, ESDI_506.PDR is used and speed upto 100 MBps can be achieved.
2. SATA Only. In this mode the SATA controller operates in legacy mode, Windows 98 SE see SATA disks as standard ATA devices (ESDI_506.PDR driver) and with enabled DMA the tested transfer speed was upto 135 MBps. The PATA devices are disabled in this mode!
3. Enhanced mode. In this mode both controllers work in native mode. It means that PATA devices are served by ESD_506.PDR, and SATA controller has yellow excalamtion mark - therefore all disk drives connected to SATA ports operate in compatibility (16-bit) mode.

Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 900
It has no driver supplied by Intel. It can work as standard PCI graphics controller in 640 x 480 x 4-bit resolution only.
There is no possibility to switch it off manually. If PCI-E graphics card is inserted, it is switched off automatically, but if PCI graphics card is inserted, it is still present.

I tried Nvidia 6200 Turbo Cache PCI-E board but it even does not work as Standard PCI VGA, it works as standard VGA only (again 640x480x4).
Then I tried some old S3 Trio64V+ PCI board and it works fine in 1024x768x16bit. I plan to try other PCI-E boards.

Intel® High Definition Audio
It seems there is no support for HDA bus in Windows 98SE, Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) High Definition Audio class driver is available for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 only.
The codec used is Realtek ALC880 and Realtek also offers no solution.

This board contains also two Marvell 1000 Mbps Ethernet controllers - the Windows 98 SE driver works fine, but sometimes it was not able to obtain the IP address from DHCP server, but there is visible delay also in Windows XP on the same computer.

The box I tested had 1024 MB of RAM and it was not necessary to do anything special to install Windows 98 SE from the original CD-ROM to this computer.

The summary so far:
- SATA disks in legacy mode and PATA disks in native mode works perfectly, but not concurrently.
- USB works in 1.1 mode only
- On-board graphics controller works in VGA mode only, add-on PCI board works correctly
- On-board audio does not work at all

What drivers are needed:
- Intel ICH6 SATA controller
- Intel ICH6 USB 2.0 EHCI controller
- Intel 915G(M) GMA900 Graphics controller
- Intel ICH6 HDA controler + Realtek ALC880 codec

Maybe somebody was able modify some existing driver to work or has any other workaround.

I did this test just to see how easy it is to operate Windows 98 SE on newer motherboards with Intel chipset.

I plan to try also next generation motherboard, Gigabyte GA-8I955X Pro with Smithfiled processor but I don't expect big differences.

If anybody has any (better) experience please let me know.

Petr

After much messing around:

1394 working ok on an external dvd.

Sound out ok, but can't test 6 ch's as I only have stereo kit.

I installed the evaluation copy of Paragon "mount everything 3" & connected a 250G sata hd. I can read from it ok, but no ntfs writes without buying the s/w.

Does anyone know if writes are reliable with the Paragon s/w? I may buy it if so. It's supposed to mount Ext2/3 hd's too but no joy there (on another system, not this ig80)

Ethernet Nic shows up twice in dev' man' & I can't get a reliable connection so unsure what's up there.

Interestingly the Scitech graphics driver works better than on Me!

Anything else before I dismantle it all?