Anyone get W98/ME to install w/ Athlon 64?

[horsecharles]

Thanks. I did a search here, btw, before posting this query.

[MCT]

not sure of your question, but

if u can afford a new pc (64 bit) why cant u afford xp? or 2k? i believe they are giving away free trials of xp64

[horsecharles]

Thank your for your kind answer, MCT!!!

I get all kinds of such goodies from the MVP program... but

I was just curious from the win98 viewpoint-- i have a couple of custom investing programs(Clarion is the programming language) that run way faster on win98, winme is a distant second, way further in back of ME is win2k, closely followed by winxp (athlon beats the pants of intel, too)-- and yes, everything properly tweaked, like udma enabled, file indexing off, intel app accelerator, swap file on its own disk-first partition, yaddah, yaddah, sis boom bah <g>

I've been told that performance on xp & ath64 didn't improve(for that particular software), so i'm leery of springing for such a system-- esp. when they're almost giving away regular athlon systems. (At least with win98 loaded, it wouldn't be just an expensive paperweight)

Ehh, what're you gonna do?

[oftentired]

The Athlon 64s, like the Opteron, have the ability to run 64-bit operating systems though the use of a new set of extensions to the x86 ISA (Instruction Set Architecture).  With the 64-bit Itanium, Intel introduced the IA-64 ISA, which has its advantages, but one major caveat with introducing a new ISA and microprocessors that use the new instructions set, is that they are not natively compatible with x86 code.  AMD took a much different approach to 64-bit computing.  They simply extended the x86 ISA to support 64-bit memory addressability. This makes the Athlon 64 natively compatible with current x86 code, while giving it support for 64-bit applications going forward.  Due to the fact that the Athlon 64 can run two different types of code, x86 and AMD64, the CPU operates in two different modes dubbed "legacy mode" and "long mode".  In legacy mode, the Athlon 64 natively runs all 16-bit or 32-bit x86 applications.  In long mode, which requires a 64-bit AMD64 compliant operating system, the Athlon 64 will enjoy all of the benefits of 64-bit computing.  Long mode also has a compatibility sub-mode that allows the running of 32-bit applications with a 64-bit operating system.  The Athlon 64's ability to run all these different types of code make it a very versatile processor.

www.hothardware.com

Would it not be suicidal (in the business sense) for the Athlon 64 to not support legacy programs?

[soldier1st]

legacy apps shouldn't be supported

i bet one day there will be an athlon 128,256,512,1000

right now there is 64 and 32 there was 16 and 8 and 4 and 0

[azagahl]

I use Win98 SE on Athlon 64 3400+ with 1 GB RAM and 512 MB swap partition.

It runs fantastic, the CPU is no problem and I use all kinds of hardware - joysticks, printers, digital cameras, usb drives, scanners w/o problems.

However If you have >512 MB RAM you must set max disk cache size to 524288 KB or less (I use 128 MB myself). The unofficial Win 98 SP 2.0b2 will automatically fix this for you.

I also have a "Destructive Labs" Sound Blaster Live! Value CT4830 which works wonderfully well but can cause major problems if you are not careful. It tends to be greedy with low memory (below 4 MB). Because of this card I have to use EMMExclude=A000-FFFF in my system.ini. Also I limit my smartdrv cache to 8 MB and ram disk (XMSDSK) to only 16 MB.

[azagahl]

> legacy apps shouldn't be supported

He asked whether anyone got it to work, not your opinion on whether it should be allowed.

Please stop posting unhelpful messages.

Thanks.

[horsecharles]

Thanks for all the answers(hey! what's up, Often? happy 2005)-- too bad i didn't stumble upon here until recently-- there's just so much misinformation out there-- esp. bad when parroted by some who've been 'in the business' for a long time...

I did know a tiny bit of Amd64's legacy support-- why was really excited: because it presently runs those legacy apps a bit faster than other processors.. It does say right on the box though, no win98 sic....

This also shows me how useless my local guy is:

azagahl Posted on Jan 21 2005, 02:00 PM

  I use Win98 SE on Athlon 64 3400+ with 1 GB RAM and 512 MB swap partition...

I put together "tweaked" systems for others, with diverse hardware, network, OS reqs. So, i'd rather pay extra & save the time/potential hassles by having the base components & OS pre-installed. The guy i've used in NY for years now, gradually became big-- with a chain of outlets-- but he's become kind of useless:

he sells lots of those 64 bit systems, but he refused to even try installing win98 on one of them.

And silly me, he talked me out of putting in in more than 512mb ram(768 i thought i could do hassle-free, since i then ship off the systems to other locales) for the dual-boot systems-- in spite of the settings changes i told him of. I've now got the multi-OS-booting folks using way too little ram-- for when they boot into win2k3 / xp & use office2003, photoshop......

azagahl I do habitually use the 512 max cache, the emmexclude, unofficial SE sp 2b, etc.

You've now taught me 1gb shouldn't be a problem-- thank you very much! And you've got me thinking re swap size & ramdisk, hmm...

The swap i do a bit different:

i usually have all OS use the same swap, which i migrate to another hard disk, not often used, placed at the beginning--- & esp. because of the different OS requirements-- set it at min 512- max 4gb. Hopefully that's not bad, esp when upping ram amount??

Ramdisk... i'm still on the fence about(and would want to use a much larger one??): some systems, no matter how one tweaks /debugs hardware, bios, OS, etc.-- periodically freeze... some almost never have that happen to. I suppose i should be better at benchmarking & interpreting such results & other error logs...

Maybe using MDGx's FMM tip(what doesn't he have a solution to?<g>), w/ its link to Rampage, etc. will make the difference.

[azagahl]

> set it at min 512- max 4gb. Hopefully that's not bad, esp when upping ram amount??

Hopefully 1.5 gb is not bad, because that might be all you can get. I don't know why, but I can't manually set more than 512 MB swap partition on Win98 SE with my 1 GB RAM system. If I try it just silently switches to "windows automatically controls your swap for you" on that drive. I have the unoffical SP 2.0b2 installed as well as a number of transplanted files from ME and XP SP 2 and the limitation is still there.

So my recommendation is to try 1.5 GB total or 512 MB swap partition or whatever is the most that Win 98 SE will allow you to do. You could also try letting Win 98 SE control the swap size and maybe then it can exceed 512 MB swap. I'm not sure.

Fortunately for me 1.5 GB is more than enough, especially with the low memory usage of Win 98 SE to begin with.

Another interesting thing is that if you have > 512 GB physical memory if you have any problems you can always set MaxPhysPage in system.ini to make Win98 SE think there is only X amount of memory installed. For example, with MaxPhysPage=30000, Win98 SE thinks only 768 KB is installed.

If you have a large amount of physical memory, say 2 GB, then you could set MaxPhysPage=40000 to have Windows use 1 GB. Then use XMSDSK (not RAMDRIVE.SYS which has a very limited max size) to create a 1 GB RAM disk. Then you could have Windows create a 1 GB swap file on the RAM disk.

Another interesting thing you can do with ram disks in Win 98 SE is to have a drvspace volume mounted on them. This effectively gives you a bigger RAM disk. What I do is have a PKZIP'ped drvspace volume file (if the volume is empty, it will deflate to be extremely small). Then, at boot time, I extract the tiny ZIP file and place the huge drvspace volume file on the ramdisk, then I use "scandisk /mount" to mount the compressed volume from the ram drive.

Clarification: it's actually best to PKZIP the drvspace volume twice. For example I have a 16 MB ramdrive volume that compresses to 19 KB after first application of PKZIP and then to 3 KB after second application. Using different pkzip options at the two compression stages I can save a few bytes. FYI, CABSDK with LZX or MSZIP compression proves to be inferior.

[soldier1st]

i have the limit vcache setting set to 999 and i have 768 and it sees it,the sp 1.6.2 fixes the limit but the 2.0 beta has no uninstaller=should have waited till 2.0

azagahl:He asked whether anyone got it to work, not your opinion on whether it should be allowed.

Please stop posting unhelpful messages.

Thanks.

those kinds of words should not be spoken publicly,no1 needs to know that,if you wanna say that pm me,it only takes 2 seconds to do and saves alot of unnessary trouble

anyways it seems that athlon 64's will work in 98=very good,i do wonder sometimes why ppl wanna use such high powered cpus into an old os like 98 but thats that.

[horsecharles]

azagahl:

Thank you for those detailed insights-- & that drivespace move, wow! Here comes my next project.

I wonder what the consequences are if say, 98 sizes pagefile(smaller), reboot, XP would then just automatically re-size it upon start??

Another interesting thing is that if you have > 512 GB physical memory if you have any problems you can always set MaxPhysPage in system.ini to make Win98 SE think there is only X amount of memory installed. For example, with MaxPhysPage=30000, Win98 SE thinks only 768 KB is installed.

That's one of the things i told my computer guy-- but he wouldn't hear any of it. I actually do it thru MSConfig/advanced/ limit memory to xx mb-- same difference, no?

Then, at boot time, I extract the tiny ZIP file and place the huge drvspace volume file on the ramdisk, then I use "scandisk /mount" to mount the compressed volume from the ram drive.

You didn't mean manually right? Those instructs can all go in the startup files?

soldier1st: anyways it seems that athlon 64's will work in 98=very good,i do wonder sometimes why ppl wanna use such high powered cpus into an old os like 98 but thats that.

In my specific case for the investment programs-- My understanding for data-intensive programs that use a lot of writing to disk in their calculations as opposed to working in ram: the 9x platform vastly outperforms the NT platform, further-- Amd kicks Intel butt. As we speak, the programs are being re-compiled for NT platform-- which i disagree. I'd much rather see them re-compiled for 64-bit workstations. I'd rather spend more money to buy those supercomputers and be forced to learn Solaris, etc., since some processes presently take a few minutes to half an hour each-- this ain't gonna change on 32 bit windows XP, and it will be years from now by the time the next Windoze for it comes out(stable release!!!) & subsequently the software is yet-again reworked for it.

As it is now, i don't see any u$e/rea$on for buying 64bit chips for pc's--- and to boot regular Athlon 2800-3000 systems can be had for almost nothing-- i'd rather run two or three separate computers simultaneously, each for it's own set of programs It's like why get a 20"+ LCD screen, when for the same money i can get two 22"CRT's...

[soldier1st]

64 bit is the way to go when there are actualy 64 bit programs,amd indeed kicks intels butt,amd r cheaper n do more per clock cycle,also crts may be old but they still have there use+there cheaper than lcds