And, as a bit of a bonus (And something I'd rather forget than write about), I will document a few other things I'd like to go into minor detail on. First off, how I managed to copy Windows 98 to another drive (From the 40GB to 80GB). This trails off into USB issues, and getting mass storage devices working on windows 98 SE. So, first off, updating the hard drive from a 40GB IDE Western Digital HDD (Noisy, slow, NOISY!) to a 80GB western digital HDD (Quieter, only slightly coffee grinder sounding, no more high pitched whine) shouldn't be hard right? Just plug them both into my windows 10 PC with USB to IDE adapters, format the 80 gig in FAT32... Oh wait! You can't format anything larger than 32GB in FAT32 in Windows NT based operating systems, and windows 98 won't see the drive to format it properly unless it's already in FAT32.. Huh, that's a problem, right?
Not really, well, somewhat... I just needed a 3rd party tool to format in FAT32, I used Fat32Formatter on my first try, that ended in weird issues, bad clusters and whatnot. After a while of passing glances at my shotgun leaning in the corner, with thoughts of sending this desktop the way of Old Yeller, I did another search and found a tool called guiformat. GUIFormat did the trick, formatted the drive in FAT32, copied the files over, and as expected, even though the partition is marked as active, it will not boot. Not to fear though, pop in my Windows 98 SE CD, go through the "Reinstall" (Windows 98 is very frugal and reuses things, though it does reinstall drivers if it has equal or "better" ones, more on this soon), everything goes fine, but on the first boot it hangs. Huh, wonder what that is?
I went into safe mode, went back through msconfig so a bunch of nonsense doesn't run at startup, like the task scheduler, the "First start" tour guide thingamawhatsit bloatware. Obviously this wasn't the issue but I gave booting a try. No go, so back into safe mode! I checked the device manger, and if you've paid attention to my previous threads, Windows 98 keeps trying to install the USB 1.1 controller as SiS 7001 Host Controller, even though the chipset is the 7002 chipset (though the USB 1.1 may very well be a SiS 7001 for all I know.) Either way, it does NOT boot with these drivers installed, though the OEM SiS 7002 USB 2.0"Enhanced Host Controller" drivers work fine. Instead I have forced Windows 98 to install the driver tiled "Standard OpenHCI USB Host Controller" for the three USB 1.1 drivers, as seen in the attachment below. Worked like a charm, everything is back up and going, I reinstalled Directx 9.0c, windows had rolled it back to 6.X, not acceptable.
Now, onto my next topic, how to make USB mass storage devices to work in windows 98 (For the most part), to do this, we'll use the universal (Keep this word in mind, all drivers are generic and this may not work for all hardware but I am using modern cheap SanDisk Cruzer 16GB drives) website:
http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/win98se-usb-mass-storage-drivers.phpHOWEVER, I MUST note the following issue I've had with this driver, it's nothing that ruins it, it's just something really irritating that probably isn't fixable. If you reboot your Windows 98 machine with the mass storage device still connected (Or powered on if it's an external HDD), it will show as both a fixed disk and removable disk, this will persist until another reboot without the drive inserted. This makes it irritating if you have a machine like mine with no functioning front USB, as you continually have to reach behind the computer to remove the drive each time you reboot. And that's very frequent with Windows 98. Furthermore comes the issue of installing this driver package, or rather getting it onto the computer to install it. I didn't want to waste a CD as I have few and I am very frugal (Yeah right, I'm a cheapskate
), so I removed the hard drive and connected it to my desktop, dumping on not only the mass storage driver but other essentials.
Lastly, I'd like to stress two things, first is the importance of a proper sound card supported in this era, these later SoundBlaster Live! series cards usually support SB16 emulation, which is very useful, the difference in the soundtrack of Doom, Blood, and other DOS games is amazing. If you're wondering what I do to use the same headphones for two PC's, it's really simple. I have a Sony TA-AV431 from ~1993 I got at a yard sale some years back. I use it to power my headphones and as a basic 5ch equalizer. I had two cables running into it. One cable from my main desktop, one from my Windows 98 machine. This caused some horrid interference (Likely due to cheap cables and the old wiring in my house). Instead, I have a audio cable running the output from the Win98SE machine to my primary desktop's "Line Input". I simply mute the line input when I'm not using the Windows 98 machine. It's a temporary solution until I can afford a USB switch, preferably with audio so I no longer have two keyboards and mice on my desktop. It's bad enough being crowded by four monitors (Three on my main desktop, I don't like juggling windows).
The second thing is that I'd like to stress the useless nature of running a monitor higher than 1024x768 in Windows 98, unless you're running a CRT at least. LCD's don't do scaling well for the most part, and forget about widescreen. Most games of this era run at 800x600 or 1024x768 without any issues, Doom, Blood, Discworld, Twisted Metal, Metal Gear solid all properly support 1024x768 as near as I can tell, but anything larger and you get a lot of weird graphical glitches, if they offer the option at all.
While I intended this to be less informative, I'd like my experiences of forgotten technology and software to help the few otu there that may actually want to do this. I'd also like to note that three smaller capacitors on the motherboard I am using are bulged and likely will need to be replaced. If you are thinking of buying an old motherboard with a few bulged capacitors, make sure they are not on the power rail, and make sure the board posts. These can be replaced but if the board does not post it's probably too far gone. It's all fun and games until you realize all hardware has an expiration date.
As a foot note, I'd like to note that I clocked the CPU down on this rig from 2.8GHz to 1.83GHz, not for stability or compatibity reasons, I have no idea what the CPU limit for windows 98 SE is. I clocked it down so it would run colder, quieter, and more efficiently. I am essentially emulating a first generation Pentium 4 at this point, one of those 1.6-1.8GHz RDRAM units with a 800MHz FSB (I do not recommend building a RDRAM system, burnt fingers much?
). I have suffered no performance impact in older games, though games past 2003 shouldn't really be run in Windows 98, I'd recommend a Windows XP build for that. Spoilers, I will be building that next, though it won't get much use other than installing GTA III, GTA VC, and GTA SA on it from my Steam library.
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