I heard people claiming 98se rocks others say me .i no me got a bad rap but if u disable some things it works well,i no theres alot of new programs 4 98se sp2 98setome etc.but u tell me which versions better.BTW i use Xp pro so dont tell me 98 suks ok its a survey im doing 4 a good friend who is force to use 9x due to old pc P2-233mhx.

Like you said, 98 blowz. Just install XP.

Wow! You're no help.

az dude,the topic is 98se or me,stay on topic plz.anyways 98 se is the better of the 2,it may be a bit older but there are sp's n stuff for it wheras with me there ain't much of anything for it,it is at best buggy,98 se is great once you tweak it n stuff but it can't compare to xp.

98se is best for a PC that slow (Me is all bloat and no action)

as for the XP dude, wtf are you doing hanging around in a Windows 95/98/98SE/ME forum,
go away, your opinion is not needed or wanted.

98se is better more tweaks appz etc me is the devil ..lol

as for the XP dude, wtf are you doing hanging around in a Windows 95/98/98SE/ME forum

Sorry, to set the record straight I am all for 98 and against XP. Right now I am using 98 SE on my Athlon 3400+ 1 GB PC with USP2.0, 98SE2ME, and Revolutions pack installed.

The "just install XP" comment was my sarcastic response to johnny_9x's quoted anti-98 comment. Fortunately he only posted 8 times before he was banned.

my apologies

go with 98se over ME!! ME is the bastard child that no one wanted. Run cache man 5.11,its free and no 9x platform should be with out it.

On that PC I would install 98se, ME has some advantages, but they are not needed and make the System very slow, I have installed Me on my Athlon 900 MHz due to recommendation from THIS forum, but only the faster Startup is the advantage to Me.

By the way, even if Off topic, try Windows 2000, because it has more support to recent Programs as Office 2003 and so.

But as answer to your question: Install Windows 98 SE.

on that PC 98se is the way to go.

azagahl,

Does your board let you have full Ms-Dos Mode use? I mean, with good real, extended and expanded memory available (if you set it for it)?

I ask, because on my Asus A7V880, Athlon 3200+, first I needed to ditch my Maxtor Sata drive and turn off the Sata Boot Rom in the Bios to get himem.sys to load without "unable to control line A20" showing up. It wouldn't do that normally, just if I put the dos memory optimizations in the config.sys for himem, dos=high,umb and emm386 RAM. And also if I did that on a boot disc. Either way I couldn't get a tiny bit of conv. or expanded memory until I used a regular IDE drive.

It also, even with the IDE drive where that problem went away, could not get the SBLive Dos Mode driver to be recognized by sbego or games. They couldn't find the IRQ it was on even when the driver was successfully loaded on 220 7 1 and I could hear the microphone working.

I talked with Asus tech's on the phone and they told me the board doesn't let you use the required non-maskable interrupts that the SBLive dos driver needs.

So, the board castraits Dos Mode. Yet they still say it's compatible with Windows 98SE! Heh, I don't call it compatible when something built in is not able to function! I ditched 98 on it and installed XP. Dosbox and vdmsound will suffice. I won't bother running a machine that doesn't allow all my dos games to still play.

I'm almost ready (parts arriving daily!) to set up my new board! I picked up an Asus A7V333 Revision 2.0 and bought an AthlonXP 3000+ and 512MB Crucial 2700 DDR for it. And, I can reserve an IRQ for non-maskable interrupts with it! Yippie! Speedy for games and video encoding and still runs dos. The dream machine (unless the thing was destroyed by a previous owner.) I'll be finding out soon. Bought an Asus Radeon 9550GE for it.

While I wait, I'm using my old Abit KT7A with a Voodoo 5 5500! 98 Rocks!

So, what board do you have and do you bother with dos on it?

I think that's no problem, he said it's on a Pentium 233 MHz.

Newer mobos with SATA/RAID/SCSI BIOSes + AMD/VIA chipsets are known to "lock" memory resources [otherwise available for good ol' DOS managers/programs/games], like A20 ["fast gate"] handler, D000-EFFF or smaller portions of upper memory area (UMA), etc.
That's because they presume nobody uses DOS nowadays, and don't care if DOS resources are needed or not.
If u have ever used UMBPCI.SYS, u know exactly what I'm talking about:
http://www.mdgx.com/umb.htm
It is known that UMBPCI can't work on most AMD/VIA based mobos because ISA DMA cache area [located in UMA] is not available in native MS-DOS.

My DOS 7.10 + Win98 SE PC is built using an old Abit BE6-II mobo with an Intel 440BX chipset, 1 of the last they made 100% compatible with DOS based memory managers/programs/devices/TSRs.
I still have a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold "stuck" in an ISA slot, for those cool DOS games, and a Quantum3D Obsidian2 X-24 3Dfx Voodoo2 PCI TV single slot SLI card mainly to play Outlaws, Rebel Assault + Rogue Squadron in Glide(3dfx) glory.

Not to forget the original X-Wing + TIE Fighter [also by Lucas Arts] which require EMS [Expanded Memory Specifications] enabled in native MS-DOS and at least 608 KB of conventional memory for stereo audio and VGA 600x400.

Good luck.

I had forgotten all about this thread.

Awesome old machine you've got there.

Remember when I talked about playin' with my SiS5598 Asus Spax-m HP Pavilion 4430/40 board? Well the reason I bought a couple of them (so cheap!) was originally to see if they could be set up as my old dos machine.

This plan failed as the ISA slots on these boards will not process any sound! PCI audio works fine, and the ISA slots work fine too, but not for any audio. I thought it might have been a bad board, but I found the same thing with the 2 new ones. I tried an ISA Modem hooked through with the cable to a couple of different PCI sound cards and couldn't get modem audio. I tried my SB16 Advanced Wave Effects ISA card and couldn't get sound out of it either. Both of these things work perfectly on my Abit KT7A board's ISA slot so I know it's not a card or driver problem. The audio is just dead for some reason by default, out of the ISA slots. This, using either an AMD K6-2 300 or 366 processors.

The only real expense to my experiment was the Crucial memory. I needed new sticks unless I was going to pull the ram from my original one. It cost as much as it originally did back in 1999! (I had upgraded the original 32MB to 256MB way back then.) The other stuff cost some money but not much. I had enough parts lying around unused that work fine.

I've had enough of this for now, but I did take note of the hardware you've got. Perhaps someday, but I doubt it. It's my hobby but I also prioritize. Hunting down and putting together something like this might be kind of fun, but also completely unnecessary. It's interesting to read about though!

And thanks for confirming the suspicions I had about the newer boards. And yet they claim compatibility with Windows 98SE! To me, that means Ms-Dos 7.1 too. But I guess it doesn't mean that to the manufacturors. It's nice to see it spelled out in black and white. When I talked to an Asus tech on the phone he just had an annoyed,"No, you can't do that," for me. No specifics. Heh, heh, even the tech at CompUSA was exasperated when I told him I couldn't believe they don't even carry one plain old mouse with a cord and a ball so I would be sure it would work in Ms-Dos Mode. He said,"What in the world do you use Ms-Dos Mode for!." Another company still carried them. (Nice of him. He told me where I could try.)

I also think fast processors confuse Ms-Dos as well. I'm noticing games crashing where they didn't before on my slower boxes. One tried to give a message but it was hidden behind the crashed game. It started,"Your Proc..." I'm finding that with that, and with the winoldap crap, it's easier even on 98 to run them on Dosbox. Funny that that thing would just love a zillion gig processor but plain old Dos farts out!

Cool games there too! Go Star Wars!

win me or 98se hmmm? i like them both Me has dos 8 and detects more drivers but 98se seems to have the fan base and theres current programs like sp2.1 98seto me etc and its so cool 2 customize .

well 98se rocks but these s*** companies have started making most of apps Xp based so 1 day or other we'll need 2 shift

MDGx, do I understand you to say the Gate A20 BIOS option can lock memory? In 98SE? Please explain, I have always had this option ON and dont think it's caused problems, but then again...

georgethetee,

Actually on is the default. Himem.sys needs to access it to read some stuff, but on newer computers many hog the thing and Himem.sys can't access it.

MDGx was talking about my findings on my own newest machine, the Asus A7V880, that if the on board SATA boot rom is activated (needed if booting from the SATA HD) then himem.sys will report "Cannot access Line A20." Windows 98SE will still run perfectly fine but Ms-Dos Mode and dos boot discs are crippled. No emm386 can be loaded so no memory management for my dos gaming! And, with this board even with a regular ATA HD the motherboard hogs the IRQ's so using the SBLive's dos mode drivers is impossible.

That's alright. I now have a speedy Asus A7V333 Revision 2.0 board with an AthlonXP 3000+(Barton) that has normal dos memory management available. So I just use my XP Home on the A7V880, and 98SE on A7V333. But, dosgames will crash where they wouldn't on slower processors. So even though Dos Mode is available I am finding myself using the latest Dosbox with the latest CVS build to play most of my dos games anyway. I still like 98 better. All of my games were designed before XP was a dream. And, everything just feels zippier and peppier!

Does your board let you have full Ms-Dos Mode use? I mean, with good real, extended and expanded memory available (if you set it for it)?

Yes, I can load HIMEM.SYS, EMM386.EXE with a complete EMS page memory, load dozens of TSR's, and then boot into Windows 98 SE. The motherboard I'm using is MSI K8T Neo Fis2R (MS-6702). Almost all my DOS TSR's are loaded high and I have like 100 K of UMB's.

I load a lot of TSR's - NANSI, smartdrv, Zeno video accelerator, some fix??.com that adds support for fonts missing from most video cards, SBLive drivers, CD-ROM drivers, RAM disk, doskey, etc.. Also I use LSPPP ethernet drivers and various apps support ftping / browsing from within DOS.

Even with all ROM shadowing turned off, I think my BIOS (or maybe it's my video card) eats up some memory at E000-E080 or so. It's really annoying and results in splitting a memory region but it's manageable I guess.

"unable to control line A20"

Never seen this message. Sorry
Also I'm not using SATA. The idea of newer technology scared me and I could just put the money into bigger capacity anyway. ATA 100 seems fast enough for me.

It is known that UMBPCI can't work on most AMD/VIA based mobos because ISA DMA cache area [located in UMA] is not available in native MS-DOS.

You're right it doesn't work and crashes like crazy even though the creator claims my chipset is supported. The extra utilities for working around the DMA problem don't help. It sounds like UMBPCI isn't able to exploit lower UMB's anyway which is unfortunate . And I believe access to memory mapped UMB's through EMM386 can be faster.

My setup also doesn't work with FreeDOS UDMA drivers. They fail randomly and can lead to hard disk corruption. I talked with the author about this but no solution was found..

Overall I'm happy. I think VIA is cheaper than intel and the VIA IDE Miniport drivers allow > 137 GB disks under 98 SE.

EXXX-FXXX areas are occupied even if u turn off ROM shadowing because u probably have some other hardware device(s) that need to use those UMA regions.
Examples: RAID, SCSI controllers, video controllers like NVidia ATI, etc.
Also, unfortunately, ROM shadowing cannot be turned off on some mobos.

About AMD/VIA approach to mobo chipsets design:
they "inspired"/licensed from original Intel 80X86 design, but because according to the Intel license they can't copy all chipset/CPU functions, they had to come up with their own workarounds, which makes their chipsets incompatible with simple low level DOS stuff, like UMA/conventional/extended/expanded memory management.
That's why it is extremely hard or even impossible for someone who programs memory devices like UMBPCI.SYS to account/cover for all chipset designs out there.
SiS, VIA, FIC, AMD all make their own mobo chipsets, and each have different ways of implementing low level [DOS mode] memory routines.
And because they presume everybody today is using Windows XP, they don't care to implement all DOS mode functions properly, because they also assume nobody is playing native DOS games anymore.

I'm also happy playing some of my old DOS games once in a while on my P3 CPU + 440BX chipset, using native MS-DOS 7.10 [a.k.a. Windows 98 SE].
Have u seen my memory specs page:
http://www.mdgx.com/mem7.htm

And I gotta tell u, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold ISA rocks in every DOS game I've thrown at it.

You use RECALL Mdgx? Do you have a bug where clicking on the Close button on a DOS Prompt window causes it not to close, but to emit a high pitched shriek instead? Because I had that bug... I ended up going with DOSKEY instead.

you should buy a can of microsoft raid i think best buy sells it lol.

In my opinion 98SE is FAR betta den Millennium...it was a complete waste of time bringin out ME...



And as for runnin a 233MHz, 98SE da PERFECT OS for it...

Yeap, I've seen that error a few times, and my fix was to type EXIT and hit Enter in the DOS box right after it starts beeping, so I can close it.

I've also tried these DOSKEY replacements:

* DOSKEY.COM v1.8 16-bit DOS keyboard enhancer and command line editor and
history TSR improved Microsoft DOSKEY.COM replacement for MS-DOS 5/6 and
Windows 9x/ME, highly customizable:
http://members.aol.com/paulhoule/doskey.htm
Direct download [6 KB, freeware]:
http://members.aol.com/paulhoule/doskey18.zip
Uses 3.9 KB of upper DOS RAM if loaded with LOADHIGH in AUTOEXEC.BAT (upper
memory manager required in CONFIG.SYS).

* CMDEDIT v3.21 16-bit DOS keyboard enhancer and command line, application,
directory, macro editor and history TSR improved Microsoft DOSKEY.COM
replacement for MS-DOS 5/6 and Windows 9x/ME, supports LFNs, loads itself high
if UMA available, highly customizable:
http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/cmdedit/
Direct download [163 KB, freeware, right-click to save!]:
http://www.geocities.com/jadoxa/cmdedit/cmded321.zip
Uses 9 KB of upper DOS RAM if loaded from AUTOEXEC.BAT (upper memory manager
required in CONFIG.SYS).

both posted here:
http://www.mdgx.com/dos.htm

but I ended up using RECALL.COM cuz I like it better for carrying command list history throughout native DOS + all Windows sessions [no matter how many times I exist Windows back to native DOS and then reload the UI], and for its small memory footprint.

I hear a lot of people b***h and moan about windows ME. BUT I bet 1/2 of you never used ME, because you heard that it was crap.

Windows 98,
cons: limited in useable ram, BSOD is a common occurance, highly unstable, not terribly USB friendly, DOS based.

pros: highly tweakable, still supported by M$.

Windows ME,

Cons: uses resources like they're free, occasionally bsod's.

pros: easy to configure, easy to configure registry to fix M$ screw ups, More user friendly than Win 98, Not 100% dos based.

95 + 98, same as ME [all part of the 9x series] are based on DOS the same way.
None of them can load without the good ol' 16-bit DOS layer.
Try to remove IFSHLP.SYS from ME, see if the UI loads. I'll save u the trouble, it won't.
They all use the DOS memory scheme [conventional, upper, high + extended] the same way.
The only improvement ME came up with was the new [at the time] WDM/WHQL driver model taken from 2000 [*.SYS drivers instead of *.VXD], and later on adopted into XP + 2003. Longhorn will use an even newer drive model.

Moreso, try to delete IO.SYS, COMMAND.COM +/- MSDOS.SYS, 9x can't even boot.
1 of the few changes they made to ME in order to mimic the loading style of NTx, was the inclusion of HIMEM.SYS as part of IO.SYS. Yes, u can delete HIMEM.SYS from ME, but that's called faking it, because the HIMEM model is identical with 98 FE + 98 SE.
Just because MS disabled [read "hid really well"] the native MS-DOS mode, that doesn't make it so.
Just apply 1 of the available real DOS mode patches:
http://www.mdgx.com/dos.htm#ME
to the ME system files, and you'll have full DOS mode back.

The usability of RAM is restricted by the 32-bit X86 CPU, which can address a maximum of 4 GB of memory [virtual address space] and up to 128 GB [physical memory space], divided in 4 MB [4096 KB] blocks.
64-bit CPUs can address up to 16 TB of RAM [virtual] and respectively 128 TB [physical].
Further restrictions exist because of the ancient MS memory model implementation [in Windows they call it VMM = Virtual Memory Manager], which in 9x series can address only up to 2 GB [theoretical limit], but in reality this is only 1 GB or in rare cases 1.5 GB [practical limit]. This is because 2 GB out of 4 are reserved for the OS itself, kernel, core, memory management + disk swapping [file paging], and only ~ 2 GB are available to programs, minus ~ 1/2 GB reserved for HD + video hardware.
User resources are an entirely different matter.
These are globally called "system resources", and consist of two 64 KB blocks of memory Windows allocates to programs/processes/TSRs for tracking purposes. 1 of these blocks makes up the user resources and the other [as u probably guessed] makes up the GDI [Graphics Device Interface] resources.
Neither of these have anything to do with real memory, a.k.a. RAM.
Resources are only place holders [pointers] for programs [dialogs, icons, bitmaps, cursors, menus etc] + hardware [keyboard, mouse, printer, VGA card etc].
If you wish to know more on these subjects, MSKB, MSDN + MS TechNet offer plenty.

I've been using all MS OSes + environments [that's what the 3.x series are actually] starting with DOS 5.0, and played around with ME for almost 2 years until I went back to 98 SE. And I have to say ME is overall one of the most troublesome MS OSes.
ME should have been released for what really is, just a patch to 98 SE.
Just because u [and I and a few others] didn't have many BSODs, that doesn't make ME a reliable OS. Take for example the hordes of users who felt like throwing their computers out the window just because ME blew up on them. It all depends on the hardware and driver compatibility.

If you care to classify, the best MS desktop OS to date is XP Pro in both 32 and 64-bit versions, and the best MS server OS is 2003.
But in the server world, many people trust the NIX/BSD models better.
In the end, it's all a matter of opinion.