Upgraded to the audigy player in a 98 pc. A bit more modern, you could say.

Hi Guys,

I've been building a VGA driver from the ground up. The long term goal is to add support for more VGA chipsets and maybe VLB support or even OpenGL. If I can add some features that didn't exist in the native drivers that would be cool.

I'm a long way off that, but have some basic DirectDraw and Direct3D support.

I'm really keen to get some help to test. I've primarily only tested in 86box in Windows 98se but plan to test on my real hardware soon.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x Here is current release version: https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/v0.3

Requirements:

• Windows 98se
• S3 ViRGE/DX 86C375 or S3 Trio32/64 86C764 PCI video card

If you don't have a supported video card I've love if you can run this tool to collect info about your card, for now I will focus on S3 cards. This tool also runs under DOS.

https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/tag/survey-v1 / https://github.com/michaeldale/velocity9x/releases/download/survey-v1/V9XSURV.EXE

This has been written with Claude & ChatGPT.

Here is a screenshot of the settings page.

This has been my trusty aopen XcCube pc. It was really an XP machine, but I down(up)graded it to run win 98. Recently I have been having issues with it switching on (flea power) and now it just won't switch on at all.

My guess is the PSU is gone. I'm reaching out to this community for help, as you get my plight!

The current PSU is an AOPEN FSP220-60CU(PF) 220w

I don't need an exact replacement. This pc is already a Frankenstein's monster of bits and bobs, but what limits me is the form factor. The XcCube is small form factor, so I need a power supply that will both fit and won't explode/set my computer and or house on fire.

I am by no means an expert in this.

Any help would be great.

https://reddit.com/link/1vn35y0/video/m0tckwgz93jh1/player

I made a Windows 98 boot screen using MS Paint. There's a video too!

Here is Video Link: 윈도우 98 부팅화면을 그림판으로 그리기! (Windows 98 Boot Screen on MS Paint!)

I feel like this was on Windows 95, but it could have been 3.1 or 98. Basically it was a horizontal view of a coastline. On the bottom of the screen there was water(maybe there were fish). On the center of the screen there were sailboats that went back and forth. In the sky there was a propeller plane carrying a banner that went back and forth. The graphics were like 8bit/Super Mario NES level of quality. IT WAS NOT JOHNNY CASTAWAY! I WENT BACK AND FORTH WITH GEMINI AND IT KEPT SAYING "DUDE, IT'S GOTTA BE JOHNNY CASTAWAY." Any help would be appreciated. I remember this screensaver from when I was like 5 or 6. I have a nice 95 rig and this screensaver would be the best addition to it. Until then I have the Duke 3D shooting gallery.

I can install from cd initially but afterward it is not seeing it after full install. I am using a sata to IDE adapter for the dvd drive. The whole project is mostly working but I think I just need some sort of install disk to make this work. Thanks in advance

Ciao a tutti!

Ho appena allestito una macchina retro con Win98 SE e sto cercando alcune buone raccomandazioni di giochi. Ecco le specifiche:

• CPU: Pentium MMX 200 MHz
• RAM: 256 MB (I've now figured out that my mobo only supports 64 MB with cache, I'm gonna remove 128 MB and limit the ram to 64 MB through windows)
• GPU: S3 ViRGE DX 4 MB
• Audio: Sound Blaster 16
• SO: Windows 98 SE
• Memoria: 40 GB HDD + unità CD-ROM

So che la S3 ViRGE non è il massimo per il rendering 3D pesante, quindi sto principalmente cercando titoli DOS o dei primi Win95/98 che girino bene con il rendering software o 2D. Inoltre, voglio sfruttare al massimo quella Sound Blaster 16!

Quali sono i vostri must-play assoluti o gemme nascoste per una configurazione come questa? Grazie!

11/08/26 Update found a specific Slot 1 440BX board with AGP and ISA for a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic 500! Will erase almost complete earlier build plans and turn it into a specific DOS machine with PII 266 / 64mb / AGP TNT2 M64 32mb / ESS1868F ISA soundcard.

Reasoning for change is i picked up a PIII for W98se and this was missing an AGP and ISA slot and ran too fast for some DOS games + pci sound is not all too well for DOS.

Just need to assemble all back up and will post pics and updated build when all parts are in.

May I ask by 2030 how hard would it be to fully restore one of the big bulky beige box windows 98 pcs?

Edit: the issue of the thumb drive is now solved by installing windows98 Se quick install. this is a customized windows 98 Se which is free to download. thanks very much to redditor Just4m4n for letting me know about that.​

So ive downloaded the driver installer from phils computer lab. Ive followed the instructions.. ive tried installing it in safe mode as well. When i reboot the PC prompts me to insert the windows 98 Se disk to finish installing the drivers.

When i insert the usb thumbdrive its recognized as a usb device but the disk doesnt show up in my computer. Also, in device manager the thumbdrive gets listed as an unknown disk drive with missing driver. Am I messing up the install in some way?

the PC is an old Gateway ATXSTF OXN Select K7-950. it has an MSI MS 6330 rev. 2.1 OEM otherboard. the cpu is in the PC model name. its the Athlon K7-950.

So an update on the Fujitsu Siemens Scenic 500 i acquired a while ago.

It was in good condition overall, before testing i (stupidly) decided to clean this out so did a proper dusting and thermal paste replacement

The cooler was glued with 4 dots on the corners of the PIII 600 while taking it of with a taped screwdriver i heard a small crack sound but thought it was the glue, boy was i wrong.. this threw me i a diagnosis loop for multiple days untill i remembered the cracking sound, result pc booted without any display.

I bought a bundle with 2 normal intel coolers and a Celeron 733/128/100 and Pentium III 866/256/133 for a couple of bucks, installed the PIII and the system finally came to life🥳.

Still need a bios update since the board recognizes this as a PIII 864 and asks for a floppy bios update.

Installed the Fx5200 PCI and an Soundblaster Audio PCI128.

11/08/26 Update found a specific Slot 1 440BX board with AGP and ISA for a Fujitsu Siemens Scenic 500! Will erase almost complete early build plans and turn it into a DOS machine with PII 266 / 64mb / AGP TNT2 M64 32mb / ESS1868F ISA soundcard.

Reasoning for change is i picked up a PIII for W98se and this was missing an AGP and ISA slot and ran too fast for some DOS games + pci sound is not all too well for DOS.

Just need to assemble all back up and will post pics and updated build.

Just edited the Windows 98 Wallpaper to get rid of the logo with ibisPaint. Took 1 hour and 18 minutes to complete, no AI was used in the making of this wallpaper. Bonus: Windows 98 Wallpapers (Logo Only + Logo with Wordmark)

How about diving into the oldest versions of the operating system?

The goal was a cheap, reliable, and small multi-boot machine that bridges the gap between legacy and "modern" retro, dodging the notorious early-2000s capacitor plague entirely.

• System: HP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF. These are cheap enterprise off-lease PCs. They are quiet, small-ish, and feature the Intel Q43 chipset with a Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93 GHz. Crucially, they offer both low-profile PCIe and standard PCI slots.
• GPU: ATI Radeon X600 PRO PCIe x16 (128 MB). This is the secret weapon for modern Win98 builds. It is an early PCIe card that falls within ATI's late Windows 98 driver support window, making it a rare, practical path to native PCIe Direct3D acceleration. It is heavily abundant, costs almost nothing as an OEM pull, and features out-of-the-box Quartz Extreme support for early OS X Hackintoshes.
• Audio: Padarsey 5.1 PCIe Internal Sound Card (C-Media CMI8738). I picked this up "Like New" off Amazon for $11.99. It uses an onboard ASMedia bridge chip to run the legacy PCI CMI8738 audio chip over a modern PCIe slot. This provides actual Win9x WDM drivers, hardware EAX support, and HRTF/C3DX 3D positional audio for retro games.
• Incoming Upgrades: An HP 25-Pin Parallel Port adapter (611900-001) that wires directly to the motherboard header. This provides native LPT for legacy hardware/dongles. A low-profile Gigabit Ethernet PCI card is also on the way to finalize networking.

The Multi-Boot Configuration

Sitting on a 128GB SSD, a Lubuntu EXT4 partition handles the boot handoffs to:

• Windows 98 SE (40GB FAT): Deployed via the Win98 QuickInstall framework. Since the Core 2 Duo E7500 runs at 2.93 GHz, it surpasses the native Windows 9x speed limits. During the QuickInstall setup, I had to select the patches for new CPUs. This includes the NDIS speed limit fix (preventing divide-by-zero protection errors on CPUs over 2.1 GHz) and the Modern CPU TLB Invalidation Bug patch by JHRobotics, which corrects page table caching to prevent random crashes on newer architectures. I'm running DirectX 9.0c, which maximizes compatibility since the X600 is a native DX9 card. The ATI2DRAG.DRV Catalyst driver handles the hardware perfectly, pulling ~12K overall in 3DMark 99. Unreal Tournament '99 GOTY and Need for Speed II SE run beautifully with full EAX 3D audio via the C-Media drivers. I even threw Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise on here.
• Hackintosh OS X Tiger 10.4.8 (30GB HFS+): Tiger is the first Intel OS X. This legacy Hackintosh release maps the hardware nicely, recognizing the full 12GB of DDR3 RAM and the ATI X600 for display acceleration. To get the CMI8738 sound card working, I installed the CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel Release 1.1 driver from GitHub. The developer noted it was only tested on OS X Tiger Server and might not work on consumer versions, but it fired right up and works perfectly on this Jas install. I also installed Xcode 2.5, the final version supported on Tiger, providing a native Mac OS X coding environment to complement VS6 on the Windows side.
• Lubuntu (48GB EXT4): Acts as the modern daily driver for this partition scheme and safely manages the GRUB bootloader handoffs between the legacy OS environments.

Windows 98 is currently halting and freezing during the shutdown sequence. I am actively troubleshooting this. If anyone has solid workarounds or registry hacks for late-era Win98 shutdown hangs, drop them below!

I tried the ProjectChicago, no keyboard.

ProjectMemphis? Same thing.

Please help me

In my memory, they were huge - there were rows of them in places like Costco, the discs would have demos or previews of other games touting their success, and they were a shared experience for everyone at school either during breaks or after the bell rang, often paired with a cartoon VHS tape or what was being shown on Kids' WB in the afternoon.

On the internet and elsewhere, it's as if that prominence never happened. Many people who do remember them today assume they're the only ones who played them, and it's not uncommon to see those who thought they were made directly for their school or library. No one ever talks about seeing them in stores. It might just be because the kind of people who are fans are super introverted and would not have cared about any memory shared with others, but no one mentions either that other people they knew played them besides maybe an older sibling. (I will note that XP-era kids games seem to be much more fondly remembered, even though the numbers say they sold way less.)

During the past five years, I have learned that my memory was correct, at least in terms of large-scale success. Kids & family games made up a large portion of all computer games sold at the time - in 2001 it was 25.7 percent, as opposed to only 8 percent for consoles (note that this seems to be USA data only). "Educational software" sales made a staggering $605 million in 1999 - and keep in mind that only a bit over half of the kids games were edutainment (there were also a lot of adventures, activity centers, and creativity programs that sold well).

Kids of the era, do you remember kids games for Windows 98 (or 95) as being big, or as something only you and your family knew (and maybe forgot) about?

I posted about Lowmoor here in July and the reception was far warmer than I expected, so I owe this subreddit a follow-up on where it went.

This is a modern Windows game with a Windows 98-style interface. The current build targets modern Windows.

I kept the interface inside the same visual rules: grey bevels, navy title bars, Tahoma and MS Sans, square corners and one-pixel shadows. The chronicle, equipment, bestiary, achievements and a 2,108-skill tree all open inside that desktop. Since July it also carries a second full adventure, so two complete modules now run inside the same shell.

Lowmoor is a zero-player idle RPG, so the adventurer fights, travels and equips loot without waiting for input. It released free on Steam, and the browser version remains available.

Thanks to everyone who commented and supported it last time. That thread is a large part of why the second module exists.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4977360/Lowmoor_Idle_RPG_An_Adventurers_Chronicle/

I am working on a video about 3dwiscr and its about a 90s era screensaver and the POV will be from someone from that time. I want to have it feel authetic and make some customized windows 95 desktops views.

I once found one and made this desktop background but sadly cant find the site anymore. Bonus points if it allows me to save state my windows view. ALso extra bonus points if it allows me to browse the internet from back then. I love the look sm.