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Call me crazy, I need a Win 98 compatible system. HELP!

T

Tailback

Member
I have a bunch of older DOS based games that I need Windows 98 to run on. I want to buy a new motherboard, CPU and RAM to replace my old system with and run it on a dual boot Win98/Win2000 system. What motherboard with onboard LAN should I get that's Win98 compatible?

Thanks
 
Try VMWare Virtual Machine; lets you run Win98SE from a file on disk, while booted in Win2000 or XP.
"VMware Workstation v5.5.0, build 18463" is the latest version.
 
VMWare is a nice app - I use it for troubleshooting, but games don't run very well on it.

I would recommend you check any mobo you might be interested in to see if the manufacturer has 98 drivers for it on their website. 98 is still supported by most mobo manufacturers.

 
FS/FT forum buy a $50 P2, P3 or sub-GHz Athlon system, and use a KVM.

I have my old P3-933 set up for games that don't like XP, but for DOS and many Win95 games a P2-266 MHz would be plenty fast and a P3-anything would be blazing.

If you're in the WA area I could set you up with most of a complete system including case/PSU for dirt cheap, otherwise try finding someone in your area since shipping a P2/P3 case costs more than it's worth.

http://www.pcsurplusonline.com/cat.cfm?CatID=1&SCatID=28 = P3 733MHz system for $105 shipped

Also, check out DOSBox: http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1
 
I second the DOSbox recommendation. Much the same way you can use an emulator to play N64 games on your PC without booting into a platform that's designed to allow for such a thing, the same principle can be applied to old DOS games. Just install the emulator, and things should work. I've had good luck with DOSbox in the past, the one issue I've had is that games that try to play sound through the PC speaker tend to be completely unplayable (all the I/O blocks whenever a sound plays) unless I disable the sounds (which is no big loss, since PC speaker noise is pretty annoying anyways).

Alternately, I think any mainboard based on the nforce3 chipset will let you use relatively modern components in your PC and still offer driver support for Win 98. Suspiciously, nforce4 drivers do not seem to exists in Win 9x flavor, so you might be out of luck if you want PCI-e for your system.
 
dual cores not compatible with Win98SE

nForce 3 & 4 boards not compatible with Win98SE

PCI-E not compatible with Win98SE

In other words, if you chose a motherboard with a VIA chipset, an AGP video card slot and a PATA hard drive instead of SATA, you should be safe. As a matter of fact, I would get minimum 3200+ but you may feel more comfortable with a maximum of 512 MB of RAM with Win98SE.

maybe this would do it:
http://cgi.ebay.ca/ASUS-K8V-X-SE-MB-AMD...36QQcategoryZ80139QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
 
I vote for trying DOSbox as well, I have a couple of DOS games I still like to play(X-Com, and Master of Magic), and they both run great with DOSbox.
 
Dosbox is a very good dos emulator. Also available for Lucas Arts games is http://www.scummvm.org . This is an excellent emulator for Fate of Atlantis, Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and numerous other games built around the SCUMM engine.


Jim
 
DOSbox is great, especially if you know your way around dos. I've been able to get about 90% of my old dos games to work with it.
 
dosbox is great and all but for a couple of games that need win98se I keep a Dell Optiplex P3 1Ghz from Boeing surplus around. For $200 ($160 if you know a boeing retiree) its a pretty nice deal.
 
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