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Help with games in Windows 98SE gaming pc.


ugooconnell

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Hello guys, i need some help with my pc, it has the following specs:

Windows 98SE with Unofficial SP3 and KernelEX.

80GB HDD

ATI Radeon 9550 256MB AGP

1GB RAM 333MHZ

Motherboard Asrock 775i65g rev 1.0

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.9GHZ 1066FSB in LGA775

and other stuff like Linksys WIFI modem, internal DVD writer, external HP CD-RW writer, internal 3com LAN card, frontal USB and card reader, full atx case, DELL SK-8135 USB multimedia keyboard, HP Optical USB Mouse.

The problem its that games like Need for Speed High Stakes look choppy? (like lag dunno the word) even in 640*480 resolution, what could be wrong. I installed a patch for more than 1gb ram and it only worked with 1.5Gb so i removed the 512MB stick and left just the 1gb stick. Also it has 2 partitions and the other one with XP in NTFS.

Edited by ugooconnell
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Are your graphics drivers configured correctly? You might go and check your acceleration settings under the Performance tab in the System control panel (click the "Graphics..." button, I think bottom center). The slider should be fully to the right, for full hardware acceleration.

If that doesn't work, perhaps some settings in the graphics drivers are messed up/not optimal?

You might also try cehcking out your BIOS settings, in particular anything related to the AGP port and/or graphics. Maybe there's a setting in there that 98 isn't agreeing with 100%?

I hope this helps...

c

Edited by cc333
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Try to search online for forums or other discusion groups where the games you're having trouble with are/were being discussed. There may be incompatibilities between game engine and certain videocard manufacturers/models/driver versions. Some games may have been released in partnership with specific videocard manufacturers which may lead to such incompatibilities. Some games may need specific patches to fix certain issues.

Personally I never fancied ATI cards myself but that's just an opinion.

EDIT:
Also try to manually set compatiblity mode to Disabled or Windows98SE in the KernelEx properties for main game executable(s). It's possbile some built-in routine checks for exotic APIs presence and assumes you're running a different OS, thus requiring capabilities that may not be available even with the help of KernelEx.

Edited by Drugwash
added KernelEx compatibility option
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I've played High Stakes before, I don't remember having any issues with it like this but I've never tried it on unofficial updates before. Can you try running the game on a vanilla Windows 98 machine and see if it continues happening? Although I don't know about the processor as well. I know Porsche Unleashed, the game after High Stakes has a problem with high speed processors like that and either the graphics look terrible or the game refuses to run at all. Try www.nfscars.net and see if they have any unofficial patches for the game itself, that might help you out. That would be my suggestion as I used to be big in the Need for Speed series. Funny though because NFSIII Hot Pursuit seems to run just fine on a high speed processor but then I don't know if it uses a different engine or not.

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Hello guys, thanks for the fast responses! Everything was cool, the BIOS options, the full acceleration and the drivers, but the problem was KernelEx!, i just disable it for the app and it worked like a charm! awesome fps, i played a race and the pc crashed hehe, i think it's just w98 things, hope it won't happen again, but like i have tons of apps and games, i need to check now the problem, btw my ram stick it's 400mhz i put it wrong in my first post and it really matters with the processor and video card.

Any upgrade to my computer you recommend? I'm getting a 3.5" sound blaster drive, a 3.5" zip drive and a big lcd monitor.

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In regard to crashes, maybe some other related game libraries require KernelEx compatibility to be disabled. Check the error dialog when/if it happens again, see if you get a filename that may lead to the culprit.

As for upgrades, personally I'd say the less - the better. For one, any added hardware piece requires a driver and a single bad driver can take the whole machine down. The more hardware pieces you have, the more chances to get crashes/freezes/etc.
Then, all this hardware takes power so your PSU may get worn up too soon. It all depends on the quality of the PSU.

If you really need to add a bunch of hardware, then add them one at a time, install corresponding driver and check the machine for a few days, see how it behaves in your usual applications, at startup/reboot and so on, to make sure the new drivers and associated resources don't negatively affect machine's behavior.

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8 hours ago, Drugwash said:

In regard to crashes, maybe some other related game libraries require KernelEx compatibility to be disabled. Check the error dialog when/if it happens again, see if you get a filename that may lead to the culprit.

High Stakes wasn't designed for Windows XP, but it *can* be made to run with a little persistence. So I'm thinking even if KernelEx is set to different settings, it's possible that it was somehow interfering with the game and the game just wasn't liking it. Seems to me once I tried running it on XP under the Windows 98 setting and the game itself ran slowly with it. I know in XP switching it between 9x and NT caused different things to happen to the game itself.

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It is possible that some upgraded system libraries (coming from uSP3 or manually added) could think they are running under a higher OS version and as such they may behave differently/erroneously. This is just a theory though.

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I think it's a very good theory. I mean lets face it, despite looking almost the same and acting the same, 9x and NT are two completely different beasts from each other with different inter-workings. It's surprising that Windows 2000 can even game these days unlike when it was originally released even though it had the capability for DirectX unlike it's NT4 predecessor, it seems around SP3 and especially SP4 things changed where it would allow more games and whatnot to work on it.

In the case of High Stakes, despite a patch being available for it, straight out of the box it HATES NTFS drives and therefor a warning would pop up each time you started the game saying there was 1MB or less drive space and even though it didn't specifically say so, that would mean your game progress would not be saved even if it appears to in the game itself. When you'd go to start it back up, the progress from last time would be lost.

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*this is my design* so far, please ignore the background hehe, i just got this 17" monitor but now im looking for something better in lcd.

671d7082e6.jpg

Btw yea there are now patches for running smoothly nfs4 in xp and higher but its the w98 feeling what we need right?

And about the less is better i agree, but like now i have the possibility for buying everything i couldnt in time,  i need to enjoy it ;)

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Beige tower, I love it!!!

Well, I haven't been in the NFS community in quite some time so I can't remember exactly what they've created but I know there are some graphics patches as well as just exe patches to help bypass certain game checks on system requirements which both 98 and XP can take advantage of. And is that a Linksys WUSB54G I see on the top of the tower? :)

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1 hour ago, Tommy said:

Beige tower, I love it!!!

Well, I haven't been in the NFS community in quite some time so I can't remember exactly what they've created but I know there are some graphics patches as well as just exe patches to help bypass certain game checks on system requirements which both 98 and XP can take advantage of. And is that a Linksys WUSB54G I see on the top of the tower? :)

Thanks! And yeah, my Linksys modem still kicking with WPA connection and browsing with Opera, Firefox and K-meleon, it rules!
And i just upgraded to 1.5GB RAM again ;)
 

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9 hours ago, ugooconnell said:

And about the less is better i agree, but like now i have the possibility for buying everything i couldnt in time,  i need to enjoy it ;)

Ah, so you won the lottery. :P Alright, build yourself a secondary computer for testing purposes; install the hardware you want, install the drivers, see how it works. When testing finished OK you may then add that piece of hardware to the main computer. Otherwise you may find yourself with a broken setup, having to take everything from scratch or waste hours/days to repair it. ;)

On duminică, 30 octombrie 2016 at 1:53 AM, Tommy said:

I think it's a very good theory. I mean lets face it, despite looking almost the same and acting the same, 9x and NT are two completely different beasts from each other with different inter-workings.

It's about API compatibility. Some newer APIs coming from the NT family may require or return Unicode strings instead of ANSI, others may require or return different structure sizes or formats and - knowing M$ - some may even directly call code in the middle of other libraries that may not match the intended ones. This can lead to erratic behavior, buffer overruns or at best wrong data being fetched and processed. Either way, working with an upgraded 9x system can be difficult, especially when running complex applications such as games.

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The worst just happened hahaha, new downloads got corrupted immediatly, looks like scandisk just found some errors, im running it right now, hoping it fixes everything, i don't remember doing anything so harmful to the file system :(

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"It's about API compatibility. Some newer APIs coming from the NT family may require or return Unicode strings instead of ANSI, others may require or return different structure sizes or formats and - knowing M$ - some may even directly call code in the middle of other libraries that may not match the intended ones."

I have found numerous examples of these issues while examining their code.
The third one is particularly egregious and is definitely not good programming practice since they could have easily added more Exports.

Edited by rloew
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