[arrowhead]

Security and stability are my main concerns. If those two items are covered I'm happy.
Thanks for making AutoPatcher

[barbarien]

Infrarecorder 0.44.1 is out now , looks it runs now under Win 98 not bad then you can replace the older Version

[barbarien]

New Flashplayer 9.0.115 is out ,ready for Autopatcher

[blue_shoe12]

G'day from Gadien,
Having a spot of trouble with the Network Status tray,
Since I'm not connected to a home network it's fairly useless to me so I'm thinking of uninstalling it.

is there anyway i can get it to load up just like dial-up networking? feels like wasted tray space,

When I'm 'not' connected to the internet and pull Network Status up and go to "Connections" i get a pop-up window that cascades over itself, can't get rid of it unless i press enter and hold my mouse over the close button...
(would ENTER...ALT+F4 do the same, there must be a better way)

Keep...Moving...Forward

This post has been edited by blue_shoe12: 25 December 2007 - 12:55 PM

[blue_shoe12]

Hello, Gadien here (gai-di-en) Love the work you've done here on Auto-patching win98SE,

Thought id give something back and show you what seems like a bug in KERNEL32.DLL because I've only just went through the installation,
(then installed clipboards (alt 1 to 9))

EXPLORER caused an invalid page fault in
module KERNEL32.DLL at 0167:bff7b9a6.
Registers:
EAX=00000000 CS=0167 EIP=bff7b9a6 EFLGS=00000246
EBX=8171d588 SS=016f ESP=0086fbe8 EBP=0086fc00
ECX=c15bced0 DS=016f ESI=77640678 FS=2517
EDX=bffcd490 ES=016f EDI=00000000 GS=0000
Bytes at CS:EIP:
ff 76 04 e8 13 89 ff ff 5e c2 04 00 56 8b 74 24
Stack dump:
77640678 77632cc6 77640678 00000000 77640678 8171d588 0086fdf0 77631e87 77640678 00000000 77637ed3 77630000 7763200a 77630000 77630000 77632064

Keep Going Forward. :-D

[soporific]

thanks for all recent posts, i'm working on a December release but its not going to be ready probably until the new year. I have high hopes for this new version. Stay tuned ... and have a safe holiday period!

[Eck]

Happy New Year to all as well!

I just used the October Full release on a Virtualbox 98SE installation on Debian (Lenny). Then I added 98SE2ME and 98MP10 to it. All went perfect!

It did mention that it couldn't find Netmeeting so it disabled the installation for it. Actually I forgot to look for it afterwards so I don't know if it's in the proper place or not. I'll check it out later. Too slow browsing the net on that thing, but about the same as VMWare was when I used to use that.

There's no tools for 9x, but substitutes work fine. SciTech Display Doctor 7 beta with a manufactured key from one of "those" things works about as well as VMWare Tools version for 98SE worked too. I even turned on SciTech's OpenGL part and now get working, albeit slow, software Direct3D like the old days on my SiS5598 archaic first computer. It has a whopping 6MB of video memory to work with (had to dumb it down from the default 8MB as Windows Setup didn't like it)! But since my old computer had 4MB video it kind of reminds me of the old days!

My Windows 98 Startup floppy couldn't load its cdrom driver, freezing for some reason even though cd works in Windows once setup. So I used an OEM Windows 98 Gold cd I have and upgraded to 98SE with the Updates Cd. The OEM's boot from cd and setup went fine using that.

I used the current Realtek AC97 audio vxd driver for Windows 95 they have. I needed to install Winrar and extract it as the installer only installs on Windows 95, but Device Manager updated the driver to the extracted folder fine. Boom! Pretty good audio. There's even SoundBlaster MS-DOS box within Windows emulation and a Wavetable midi driver, although the midi skips. The normal wave audio is fine.

I did the Environment patch first, and then selected (mostly adding things) what modules I wanted and the whole process went just fine except for missing Netmeeting.

Since this is Virtualbox OSS I don't have USB so no printing, and no shared folders with the host. I'll look into configuring Samba (no clue ) so I can transfer files back and forth. The NAT internet works fine.

Kinda fun!

This post has been edited by Eck: 05 January 2008 - 11:23 PM

[lightninglord2000]

So what's the status of the December 2007 edition? It is already January 2008 now. Any status update of the project or estimated launch date?

This post has been edited by lightninglord2000: 05 January 2008 - 09:46 PM

[Eck]

Don't worry. The current edition would only be missing a small amount of updated patches and any new goodies that may be in store for us in future versions. But most goodies are already there and in my experience all install nicely.

No "are we there yet" anticipation needed with this thing. It already has just about everything. Once installed, perhaps just checking the front page of that current updates sticky topic once in a while will keep us informed of anything vital that we need to install right away. As long as our systems are working fine, there's really no rush to install the new stuff anyway. What's fixed in 98SE has been fixed. We're running dinosaur's here. Not much new under the sun!

I'm sure they'll be a new edition, but there's no reason to rush it out before it's ready.

[soporific]

Eck, on Jan 6 2008, 04:21 PM, said:

Don't worry. The current edition would only be missing a small amount of updated patches and any new goodies that may be in store for us in future versions. But most goodies are already there and in my experience all install nicely.

No "are we there yet" anticipation needed with this thing. It already has just about everything. Once installed, perhaps just checking the front page of that current updates sticky topic once in a while will keep us informed of anything vital that we need to install right away. As long as our systems are working fine, there's really no rush to install the new stuff anyway. What's fixed in 98SE has been fixed. We're running dinosaur's here. Not much new under the sun!

I'm sure they'll be a new edition, but there's no reason to rush it out before it's ready.

You said it Eck.

However, i should say something on the subject ... in the short term, a new AP will hopefully be out within a week, and in the long term, i'm hoping to switch to a GUI interface. More details soon ...

[ingohaake]

I've just installed the October 2007 Full Release on two older computers. Awesome! The machines are running like new. Thank you very much for your EXCELLENT work, soporific!

[RetroOS]

soporific, on Jan 6 2008, 10:49 PM, said:

...
However, i should say something on the subject ... in the short term, a new AP will hopefully be out within a week, and in the long term, i'm hoping to switch to a GUI interface. More details soon ...

Oooh! AP to get a facelift?
It's sooo nice to see that's there's still dedication to 9x in 2008.

Take your time soporific.

BTW, I posted some new tweak stuff in your 9x Tweaks Pack thread.

[soporific]

RetroOS, on Jan 9 2008, 07:45 PM, said:

Oooh! AP to get a facelift?
It's sooo nice to see that's there's still dedication to 9x in 2008.

Take your time soporific.

BTW, I posted some new tweak stuff in your 9x Tweaks Pack thread.

what tweaks thread? can't you see i'm desperately trying to avoid touching that thread in the hopes that it will just go away? seriously, thanks for the info, i will get around to updating the Tweaks pack, only about 6 months overdue ...

AP NEWS: --- i've found a few more updates and a better way to install them taking less time, and that is to use the work of the elusive Maximus Decim. I've got his cumulative updater doing all the work for 127 updates which are all grouped together in the first module. This saves quite a bit of time when using AP on a newly installed OS. I'll be trying out his other packs as well, so my promise of a new AP within a week might just have been slightly precipitous, there's lots to wade thru. MD did quite well with the updater but not so well that it was a breeze to integrate. Oh well. So, i've already managed to replace over 100 files in AP with the one file, but still keeping all the functionality, ie you still get to see what updates needed installing, and AP still checks that each of them was installed correctly via the checking method.

If anyone knows of any problems people have had using MDs Cumulative Updater 2.50 which he released mid December, please say something.

[Eck]

Don't know. But I kind of liked having a folder with every update in it and also watching as each one installed with explanation. Hopefully the pack will work as designed when integrated if that is the way you'd like to go, however I was never so obsessed with space or size saving. I think I'd like it to stay the way you've had it, but of course a nice looking gui is fun. No problem there.

I've used the Maximus-Decim MDAC updater many times, though not recently because I got lazy and just hoped that whatever the Auto-Patcher installed would put whatever that stuff does onto the system properly. I've been a bit concerned that the 2.5 version is really supposed to be installed first as it includes components not part of 2.8. Maximus-Decim's MDAC updater included parts of the older version so we got the whole set of stuff when using it. I'm positive we're missing something when just installing MDAC 2.8. Not sure precisely which parts (used to know but it's been a long time and a lot of info that used to be part of my 98 knowledge now escapes me). So I consider Maximus-Decim's MDAC pack superior to just installing 2.8, if that is any indication of how his full updater does its thing.

Perhaps his MDAC pack would be an appropriate package to substitute for whatever we're using for MDAC 2.8 now. I believe it includes a whole bunch of stuff besides just MDAC, some of which may already be included in Auto-Patcher so you should check out his readme. If I recall, you only see the readme with the details when you run the package. Maybe there was a version of Visual Studio in there? Again, memory fails. But you can run the package and check out the readme to see. Just cancel out of it instead of continuing. I can tell you that it works flawlessly.

Virtualbox running 98SE seems way slower, at least in internet browsing speed, than I recall from my VMWare days. I tried up-ing the video memory to 16MB, putting the virtual memory fixed to triple the 256MB I have it running, activating the ConservativeSwapfileUsage=1. Still slow going. I've heard it works better with XP as a guest as they have it optimized for the NT versions of Windows. But I've got the real Vista to run stuff that can run in XP, so that wouldn't help me. It's things that were broken since XP SP2 for security reasons that used to run on 98SE (and XP until SP2) that I would like to be able to virtualize. They are still broken in Vista and Wine and Dosbox do not run this 98SE stuff I'm talking about. They require QuickTime, Shockwave within software (not the browser) so I am concerned that they will be just too slow and skippy to make the bother of this worthwhile. That's how video is on the internet using Windows Media Video embedded streaming, slow and skippy. Sounds great when it's not skipping, but the video still frame jerks a lot. Not too promising.

Well, I'm almost near the point of testing those things out so we'll see. I'm not optimistic. And to think I again gave up a 98SE/XP/Linux dual boot to put Vista on here as my Vista/Linux dual boot. I was also swapping some hardware and I figured since I paid for Vista I might as well try to use it again as the more time advances the better they'll get it optimized for performance. Of course once I had it setup I've been in Linux all the time anyway. But no, it hasn't stopped thrashing the hard drive all the time yet as far as I could tell. Maybe the new Service Pack?

Qemu may be the way to go for 98SE. There's a nice 3rd party GUI for it that is in Debian. Maybe I'll check it out if things don't satisfy with Virtualbox. Qemu is supposed to be better at the 9x systems than Virtualbox. But just not as easily configured. The major virtualization companies are concentrating on current operating systems as those are where they can make money from supporting them for business use. So I don't blame them, but really they'd probably just need to give it a few tweaks to get it running 9x better. Too bad.

The only folks who still care enough to give attention to 9x are in this place it seems. Any virtualization wizards around here?

[soporific]

Eck, on Jan 10 2008, 02:57 PM, said:

Don't know. But I kind of liked having a folder with every update in it and also watching as each one installed with explanation. Hopefully the pack will work as designed when integrated if that is the way you'd like to go, however I was never so obsessed with space or size saving. I think I'd like it to stay the way you've had it, but of course a nice looking gui is fun. No problem there.

Thanks for the feedback, it was interesting to hear your thoughts on the proposed GUI change.

1. The reason the next AP is taking so long is that i've had to carefully go thru everything inside MD's updater. You still get to see the realtime checking of updates, the only difference you see is that instead of "installation complete" it says that it will be completed after reboot. After wading thru 127 updates, if any need to be installed, then AP calls MD's Updater and runs it. After reboot, AP still goes thru each install to make sure it was installed. So, really, you will be hard pressed to see much difference. The modules have changed - the following have been taken out and the contents merged with the System Stability Hotfixes module: Laptop Hotfixes, Other Recommended System Hotfixes, and Rare and Obscure System Hotfixes.

2. If i do make a GUI for AP, it will work basically the same. In stead of a DOS box, you'll see a Window but hopefully the same messages you're used to seeing. The reason i need to do this is to avoid all these out of memory messages i get while testing. Its driving me nuts.

[Eck]

Sounds great! The whole point is not to need to wade through zillions of updates ourselves, so there really isn't any need to have then all extracted and available to install individually if Auto-Patcher can handle it. I was only thinking of the case where one didn't want to run the whole program and just apply/reapply one update. For that it was nice to just have the thing in a folder to double-click without needing to re-run Auto-Patcher and go through the whole procedure. Mostly though, we only need to run Auto-Patcher once and everything gets installed so it's really no big deal.

Regarding the GUI, I like GUI's so that's great. However I think it is important to be sure it can run in 8 bit 256 color with the Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) as well as normally in whatever resolution an installed video driver would feed it. Sometimes folks will use Auto-Patcher before installing videocard drivers and sometimes they'll have the drivers installed. Some GUI's are finicky and won't run without Hi-Color 16-bit. When I used to use the Internet Explorer 6 SP1 Microsoft cd to install IE6, I needed to browse to the folder's setup executable because the GUI wouldn't run on 16-Color 8-bit 256K graphics. Many folks will install Auto-Patcher before the video drivers because some drivers require Direct X 9 installed prior to the driver setup. With VirtualBox this didn't matter as SciTech Display Doctor runs (although it complains about it) on the older Direct X. But NVidia/ATI need the newer Direct X installed first.

[Eck]

By the way, it's mainly internet speed that is slow on 9x in Virtualbox. I just played some of my old games and programs, including that QuickTime/Shockwave thing, and they work just fine and at full speed. Occasionally the audio/video would get out of synch, but it would correct itself in a moment.

So, although browsing the internet is too slow for comfortable usage the programs I want to run that only run in 98 do run at full speed. Nice! I burned the Virtualbox vmi file to a dvd+r, so hopefully I won't need to install and setup Windows again when I jump around Linux distro's and format.

They must just optimize that AMD/PCNet virtual ethernet card for NT operating systems. It works, but it's slower than 56k dialup on my cable internet with NAT. I wonder if there's something I could adjust for that? I recall the 98SE defaults usually were okay, but also some guide linked from mdgx.com with some recommendations. I'll go see if I can find that again.

[soporific]

AP NEWS: I have had to completely junk the new code that included MD's Cumulative Updater. The reason is that there is something in it that causes a huge problem if you then subsequently install Revolutions Pack 7. And that problem is - you can't use Auto-Patcher ever again. For some reason, Windows loses the ability to create new Virtual Machines (DOS boxes) with the environment space dynamically set. Ie, normally you can use COMMAND.COM to create a new DOS box with a set Environment Space, and i have used this extensively all the way thru AP because it uses so much space to get everything done. Now that this functionality is gone, AP is useless and will not work on your machine. I have tried to get around this, but if would need a complete re-write of the program, and that is going to happen soon anyway but i'll be switching to a GUI interface, and so this problem won't ever be there again. But that's months away. So, in the meantime, i'm still using the old code.

I have managed to salvage some stuff, it certainly wasn't a complete waste of time, so they'll still be lots of new additions, but not as many as before. MD's updater is actually very very good, its a pity it causes such a bad problem to the point i have had to announce a quarantine on the updater so no-one loses the ability to use AP.

Comments welcome.

[Tihiy]

Drop RP7?

[RetroOS]

soporific, on Jan 14 2008, 04:41 PM, said:

AP NEWS: I have had to completely junk the new code that included MD's Cumulative Updater. The reason is that there is something in it that causes a huge problem if you then subsequently install Revolutions Pack 7. And that problem is - you can't use Auto-Patcher ever again...

Hi soporific,
I cannot understand how using MD's CU can cabbage the Command Interpreter...
Surley CU does not modify system settings or files?
It must be the way the updates are installing.
My understanding is that CU chains the installs in one hit?
A problem right away is that some updates contain overlapping and different versions of certain files.
If some locked files need replacing at boot time, then an update may leave a bad version matching of system files...

Scenario:
Install A has all updated files including some for locked files that are scheduled for WININIT boot processing.
Install B has all updated files but some are older than Install A. When these older (but newer than current) files are scheduled for boot replacement, they will effectively backdate those files to a newer than current, but older than the matched file set of Install A.
The problem is solved by installing A, rebooting, installing B - what AP does now.

Anyway, that's how I figure it.