98se on modern motherboards

U

UK-Tim

Hi People,

Over the last 6 months I've been trying out some 15 or so (775 & Socket P) motherboards with Windows 98se, trying to find
ones that will work correctly with "Stand by - suspend to memory", "restart in ms-dos mode" and "FDAPM.com - DOS power
management", and so far I've only found 3 boards that work correctly and even then, only with certain graphic cards. Also
power consumption, cpu speed and time taken to POST were also important. My fastest board to post and run 98se
is a D815EEA + 1Ghz Pentium 3, only 6 seconds from power-on to the dos prompt. However its ability in XP is quite poor, mainly
due to lack of memory (768MB), I think.

MSI P31 Neo + E8500 cpu, 2GB, ATI x300 pcie & 2 x HD502HJ + DVD. (87w and 65w with power management) (12 sec post)

GA-EP31-DS3L + E8500 cpu, 2GB, ATI x300 pcie & 2 x HD502HJ + DVD. (85w and 65w with power management) (15 sec post)

Asus IMISR-VM + T8300 cpu, 2GB, ATI Rage XL 8MB pci & 1 x ST500LT012 + DVD. (45.5w and 35w with power management) (13 sec post) (I think the post will be quicker with a later pci card and I'm waiting for 2 cards to arrive)

The above boards all run 2k and XP without a problem on separate primary partitions and share most of the logical drives.

Matrox cards also worked but were very slow to initialise, also despite all the patches and fixes I was unable to get any Nvidia
cards to work correctly under all conditions.

I also came across a slightly later installable Intel chipset driver than currently listed on philscomputerlab.com.

Version: 6.3.0.1008 - Target Chipset Intel(R) E8500 - Date: February 09, 2005 (D865GLC Motherboard)

I personally only use 98se as a glorified IDE for low level programming because it's so close to real mode and
is so much quicker to reboot if needed than later systems, but I would like to share the info I've gained on my
foray into 98se & later motherboards, but can't seem to find a suitable forum, can anyone suggest one?

Tim
 
There's a forum I frequent called VOGONS (Very Old Games On New Systems) which specializes, as their name implies, getting legacy games running on modern hardware/OSes. They have a subforum dedicated to legacy hardware.

https://www.vogons.org/viewforum.php?f=60

They have members which are fairly knowledgeable in hardware of the era you describe and may not only be interested in your findings but may be able offer insight on other compatible hardware.
 
Hmm, interesting that 1Ghz P3 w/ 768MB RAM is poor peformer on WinXP?
How can it be? I have old Laptop Compaq Armada used occasionally.
It have some Celeron 633MHz CPU and 256MB RAM. Win2003 is installed there
and it works pretty fine for basic stuff. Yes, Win2003 is heavly tuned, but I think you can do the same for WinXP.
Are you trying WinXP SP3 by chance?
 
Windows 98 only requires 16 MB of memory, although 24 MB is recommended. You probably have to be careful because having too much memory may cause problems in some circumstances.

The main problem with newer computers is drivers. Even if you can get the computer to boot it may only be using default Windows drivers which means it will be slow.

A person would be better off trying to locate a really old computer to use with Windows 98 SE. I have a couple old computers running Windows XP. If I wanted to I would have no problems running Windows 98 SE since I have Windows 98 drivers for both the motherboards and GPUs.. They are:
ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with VCGFX59APB (GeForce FX5900) GPU.
ASUS A7V400-MX motherboard with PNY VCGF4TI46APB (GeForce4 ti4600) GPU.
 
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