Jump to content

Modern motherboards which are working with Windows 98 (discussion)


Recommended Posts

...

Download INFINST.EXE [current version, works only with XP/2003/Vista] from Intel:

...

Extract the CAT + INF files from the WinXP (x86) subfolder.

Place them into your Windows 98 SE/ME INF subfolder:

...

I was wondering if newer Intel INFs would work.

Maybe someone can use the 9x Intel Chipset INF Installer and modify with the latest INFs?

Link to comment
Share on other sites


I have a Gigabyte P35-DS3L mobo:

http://tw.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboa...?ProductID=2599

+ an Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 CPU + a GeForce 7600 PCIx video card.

Hi, thanks for report.

I can confirm that Win98SE works well on P31+ICH7 (GA-P31-DS3L). I used modified INF files by Peter and all HW components was detected. I don't have any /!\ in device manager. On prevoius MB I had one ! for LPC interface.

But I have now other 2 problems:

1) I extend RAM 1GB -> 2GB

even if I tweak Vcache size in system.ini I cannot boot windows in normal mode and safe mode. Normal mode hangs with blinking cursor on text scree. Safe mode will not boot due to not enough memory :P

2) Onboard 1Gbit ethernet Realtek 8111B.

There's Win98SE driver on Realtek site but after I installed it, windows cannot boot. It hangs with message about corruption of memory protection in textmode. I can boot in safe mode an disable network controller in CPL. Then it boots in normal mode again. Interesting is that when I enable the network controller in CPL windows enables it without restart and I can use network normally unitl next reboot. Maybe I could try older driver.

Edited by xrayer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

FWIW, I have been successful in putting a base WinME install from an OEM CD onto an AM2 chipset. By base, I mean I got the desktop, everything works, but I haven't yet been successful in changing the Asus/Nvidia W2K drivers for the chipset, IDE, LAN, etc to work with the board and WinME. Despite that, the thing is fast, but I got 3 entries each for the base, primary and seconday IDE channels. Still works. I can put up with it since it's my main machine with SATA, and all I do is disconnect the SATA and connect up the IDE when I want to experiment.

Board is an Asus M2NPV-VM (430/6150) with PCI-E. I attached a WD 80 gig IDE drive, FDisk'd and formatted a single primary Fat16 partition of 2047mb with a custom WinMe boot disk. I was using the onboard 6150 display adapter attached via digital (not analogue) port to a Samsung 213T LCD. I kept the whole 2 gigs of RAM in during the install, and did not touch system.ini at all.

My reason for starting with WinMe, rather than Win98se, is that if this doesn't work, then for sure Win98se won't. The art of the possible first, then back up. I tried half-heartedly first using a 250 gig SATA drive, but was rebuffed - mouse & screen froze during install. BTW, anyone trying to install WinME should be very careful to not use the mouse more than absolutely necessary during install. First install try it hung two-thirds of the way through the install when I moved it to see if it was still working.

As I blow my brains out on trying to modify the Nvidia drivers, I'll let you know what happens. I've ghosted the workable/basic Drive C: WinMe onto a newly created drive D:, so that should help if I screw up, going forward.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2) Onboard 1Gbit ethernet Realtek 8111B.

There's Win98SE driver on Realtek site but after I installed it, windows cannot boot. It hangs with message about corruption of memory protection in textmode. I can boot in safe mode an disable network controller in CPL. Then it boots in normal mode again. Interesting is that when I enable the network controller in CPL windows enables it without restart and I can use network normally unitl next reboot. Maybe I could try older driver.

Problem solved. I used older driver distributed on Gigabyte installation CD. I will upload it on windows98.ic.cz

EDIT: Working RTL8111 driver is available here: http://windows98.ic.cz/net/rtl8111.zip

I also did a small update of intel chipset inf files (change in 945.inf), download here: http://windows98.ic.cz/chipset/intelinf.zip

devmgr.gif

Edited by xrayer
Link to comment
Share on other sites

9x & ME: Fading Memories

I recently tried to put 98se, then ME, on my Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard. Using a PATA drive, each basic installation went on, albeit with system.ini, esdi_507.pdr and other tricks mentioned in the forum threads. With a SATA drive, however, the best I could do was to get 98se to to the initial desktop after install. At that point it essentially froze. I never was able to get ME all the way through the installation routine using SATA. No PATA Compatibility mode, eh?

Even if I had been able to run these base installs, they would still be lacking drivers, in my case, NVIDIA/Asus, to make use of the motherboard resources and, by extension, the LAN, USB, and PCI-E functionality to name a few. Fun, interesting, but not much utility

The effort that has been made by contributors to this forum ... in advice, answers, code, updates and retrofitting, tricks and workarounds, is extraordinary. It's probably because DOS, then Win 3x, then Win98 & ME were so much fun to play with, although it wasn't so much fun at the time if, for example, you had plunked down good money for the latest and greatest DOS 4.x only to find that it was "slightly ahead of its time", a.k.a. a turkey. All the effort now means that older boards, say NF2 and before (in my case), will continue to shine with 98 & ME versions and upgrades, and for that many folks should be appreciative and thankful.

But for newer boards, 754, 939 and now the AM(+) and whatever the future holds, anything older than Win2K is essentially a no-go. Not impossible, I imagine, if you are quite techically inclined and purposeful, but for the average technical smarts of the 9x generation, probably effectively dead.

I will miss the fun and thrill of trying to get another 30 bytes of low mem in DOS, or tuning Win 3 to run in Real Mode like a speed demon on a Harris 286 where I had replaced the stock crystal with a "daring" 20 Mhz part.

But I guess those days are over. Putting the latest and greatest skin on XP, or listening to suckers moan about Vista, just doesn't have the same cachet. Not even close. So I'll stay with openSUSE that I've been using as my prime machine for the past 18 months with absolutely gorgeous font display, far ahead of Vista capability, boot into Win2k or XP if I have the need (very seldom), and just lean back and recall "the good old days" when I have a spare moment.

Thanks greatly for the fine memories.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's really not that bad. There are plenty of socket 754 and 939 boards that will run Win98(SE) just fine, and I've used it as my main system on an nForce3 (socket 754) board. It installed OK on my AM2 (Via K8M890) board as well, complete with embedded (S3 Chrome9 IGP) video support - though I couldn't find a Win9x driver for the embedded (Realtek ALC883) audio (easily remedied with a cheap audio card, had I cared to do so) and once in a while it hangs for no obvious reason (having moved to using mostly Win2K on that system these days it's not worth worrying about).

In fact, the only recent machine of ours that it *won't* install on is a GeForce6150B with nForce430 (haven't tried just plunking down some other working Win98SE system on it and trying to update drivers individually because I haven't been able to find any Win9x 430 drivers for it even if the unofficial nVidia driver here would support the 6150 - elsewhere in this thread I think I remember mention of an ECS nForce 4 board that purportedly supported Win9x, but I couldn't find drivers to download and try). But DOS 7.1 still runs fine there (and will run WFW 3.11 if you want to: with an 8 GB FAT32 partition its File Manager won't admit that free or used space can exceed 1.99 MB, but everything else seems to work based on a very cursory test) - as does DOS 6.22 (which I tried installing just for why-not - perhaps I'm getting old, but I can't say that I relished the thought of what it might take to optimize its RAM use and create a network-enabled system with it).

That said, having more or less migrated to Win2K over the past 8 months or so I can't say that there's too much of Win9x that I miss there. Just about everything we used to run on Win9x (save for the occasional ancient DOS game) runs on Win2K, plus a lot of stuff that wouldn't run on Win9x (I do find it annoying that some things say they require XP, since there's little obvious reason why they should - haven't yet tried setting up Win2K to lie to them to see how that works). And with supported Win9x network protection software becoming hard to find using Win9x for surfing is becoming a bit dicey: AVG seems to be planning to drop Win9x support this summer, leaving only Avast - I think - with any active anti-virus protection, and while being up-to-date is less important for firewalls I'm not sure that ZA 5.5 makes me feel as warm and fuzzy as I'd like to (I tried Jetico but it doesn't seem to like some of my systems). Since we sit behind a modest hardware router we might be OK with just about nothing at all, but still...

Dual-booting a Win2K logical partition off a Win98SE primary partition let's me use AntiVir, Comodo, and ThreatFire to protect both (not that I've removed AVG, ZA, and WinPatrol from Win98: even limited active protection is better than none at all) - and the FAT32 partition (where I've set up Firefox and Thunderbird so that their profiles can be accessed from either system) can easily be shared with the Linux system that I keep meaning to try out. With even just 256 MB of RAM Win2K seems nearly as responsive as Win98SE on anything but decade-old hardware, and at least as stable. I'm getting tempted to rip TCP/IP support out of the Win98SE system so that I won't be tempted to surf with it (our home LAN uses NetBEUI, so that'll still be accessible).

Whoops - this may not be the right place to extoll Win2K's virtues, and given that I've been happy with Win98 until *very* recently I wouldn't want to seem to be knocking it now. Guess I'm just trying to say that a) there's still a lot of hardware on which it will run just fine (though relatively little *new* hardware where that's true) and b) dual-booting with newer Windows versions provides one easy way to keep using it safely.

- bill

Edited by billtodd
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1) I extend RAM 1GB -> 2GB

even if I tweak Vcache size in system.ini I cannot boot windows in normal mode and safe mode. Normal mode hangs with blinking cursor on text scree. Safe mode will not boot due to not enough memory :P

Problem (partially) solved!

After some days of messing I finally found HimemX XMS manager freely available here http://japheth.de/Jemm.html

which allows you to limit XMS size by /MAX= option. After I limit XMS to 1GB it boots and seems to work fine!

Of course windows sees then only 1GB but it's acceptable for me, I don't need then any commercial patch.

Here's my lines of system.ini:

[386Enh]

MaxPhysPage=40000

[vcache]

MaxFileCache=261120

MinFileCache=32768

ChunkSize=4096

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Foxconn has created only socket 775 MBO with FSB 1333 which can support Windows 98 SE

Name of MBO is: 671 MX ( http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Moth...ID=en-us0000335 )

Special thing about this MBO is chipset SIS® 671 + 968 with Integrated VGA. Because it is possible to download Windows 98 SE GPU drivers from Foxconn site ( http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/down...ID=en-us0000004 ) it seems that this MBO is supporting Windows 98 SE with official drivers

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hello!

Any one here knows if it is possible to buy a new laptop that can be used with windows 98?

Maybe Fujitsu Siemens ESPRIMO V5535. Specifications of its motherboard:

Northbridge ... SIS M672

Southbridge ... SiS 968

Graphics ... SiS Mirage 3+ Graphics, 64-256 MB shared memory

LAN ... SiS196

http://extranet.fujitsu-siemens.com/VIL/dm...obile_v5535.pdf

Regards, Roman

Edited by modicr
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Foxconn has created only socket 775 MBO with FSB 1333 which can support Windows 98 SE

Name of MBO is: 671 MX ( http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Moth...ID=en-us0000335 )

Special thing about this MBO is chipset SIS® 671 + 968 with Integrated VGA. Because it is possible to download Windows 98 SE GPU drivers from Foxconn site ( http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/down...ID=en-us0000004 ) it seems that this MBO is supporting Windows 98 SE with official drivers

The onboard ALC662 is an HD audio codec, so it can't support Windows 98 SE.

Besides, USB2.0 driver is not available.

The latest SATA/RAID driver released by SIS is v4.11a, but I can't find anything about SIS968 in sisraid.inf.

If luckily, SATA HDD may work at IDE compatibility mode.

Integrated LAN driver is offered by SIS.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Any one here knows if it is possible to buy a new laptop that can be used with windows 98?

It is weird but Fujitsu-Siemens are best for that (I do not understand why ?)

This are links for Via Windows 98 SE drivers http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageI...&CatID=1110

On this link you have chipset VN896 , and notebook Amilo Li 1705 is created around that chipset ( http://extranet.fujitsu-siemens.com/VIL/dm...ilo_li_1705.pdf ) and Amilo Li 1703 is created around another Via chipset.

It is possible to buy Everex notebooks

gBook VA1500V

StepNote NC1610

StepNote VA2001T

Zonbu Notebook

They are all created aroung Via chipset and Via IGP so they can work but more checking is needed.

Edited by Rjecina
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Comments about this MBO created around chipset SiS 671 are right, but there is few tricks which we can use to solve few problems.

We all know that MBO which are supporting Windows Vista do not support sound in Windows 98 SE. Only solution is to buy PCI sound card (if you wish to have sound in Win98)

SATA is not great problem because MBO is having IDE connector so it is possible to use ATA hard drive and in worst case scenario together with him DVD

USB 2.0 is problem

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...

Report!:

A successfull win98 install on MSI K9MM-V with:

1. Athlon LE-1640 (2.6 GHz)

2. 160 GB SATA2 hdd (works in SATA1 mode)

3. 1x1GB Ram DDR2 800

4. All drivers from MSI site

Workarround (at least what i did):

1. Set SATA Mode in BIOS to "RAID"

2. Make partitions of HDD less than 128 GB.

3. Immediately after windows instalation, edit system.ini file, to define how OS will use the 1 gb RAM.

4. VIA has all the desired drivers, so do not bother for that!

Windows 98SE is FAST! :thumbup

Edited by tonich
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Report!:

A successfull win98 install on MSI K9MM-V with:

1. Athlon LE-1640 (2.6 GHz)

2. 160 GB SATA2 hdd (works in SATA1 mode)

3. 1x1GB Ram DDR2 800

4. All drivers from MSI site

Workarround (at least what i did):

1. Set SATA Mode in BIOS to "RAID"

2. Make partitions of HDD less than 128 GB.

3. Immediately after windows instalation, edit system.ini file, to define how OS will use the 1 gb RAM.

4. VIA has all the desired drivers, so do not bother for that!

Windows 98SE is FAST! :thumbup

Thanks for the info! Was thinking of building another PC and Via has been pretty reliable in the past. I also see that the MOBO has ATA-133 so one could use older hard drive if required.

Are you using the NUSB stuff available from this forum on it ok?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...