Windows 98 Newbie Looking for Help

English Invader

I've just put Windows 98 on an old hand-me-down PC with 256MB RAM and a graphics card that can only do 640x480 and can't even handle Microsoft Golf!

My aim is to repurpose this system to play MS-DOS/95/98 era games so the first priority is to upgrade the graphics. Which graphics cards would you recommend?

I'm also having trouble getting sound. The motherboard appears to be XP era with mostly USB connectors and onboard sound (the previous owner used XP on this system) and I'm not sure whether I'm better off looking for a driver to bring 98 up to speed or getting a dedicated sound card more in keeping with the 98 era.

I would also like to thank the people involved for providing the resources here. Their diligence has helped me save an old PC from the proverbial scrap heap.

calvinb

If you have 256 MB RAM, then chances are the graphics card is capable of much higher resolutions. My guess is you don't have the drivers installed. Do you know what card is installed?

A dedicated sound card only makes sense if you're running into compatibility issues (with DOS stuff) or it sounds horrible. You'd want an ISA card, but I doubt this machine would have the slots for it. (Recommended replacements if needed: SoundBlaster Live, Aureal Vortex 2)

XP era is meaningless because it lasted until late Core 2. I'm going to guess this is a P4 Northwood, in which case, 9x drivers for everything on board should exist. (And IMHO, Northwood hardware belongs in the scrap heap....)

English Invader

The processor is an AMD Athlon with a clock speed of 1.6 Ghz. The graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440. I've just found a driver for it and I'll see how that goes. Thanks for your advice.

I've been messing around a bit with drivers today and I've had to reinstall the OS twice! One was an Nvidia driver on the Windows CD and the other was a generic USB sound driver which I thought might get my speakers working.

KCompRoom2000

English Invader wrote:

My aim is to repurpose this system to play MS-DOS/95/98 era games so the first priority is to upgrade the graphics. Which graphics cards would you recommend?

Any graphics card with available Windows 98 drivers should work on your system, look at the system requirements for the games you plan on playing to get an idea of what graphics card you'll want, Your GeForce4 MX440 that you got drivers for should suffice once you get it working correctly.

English Invader wrote:

I'm also having trouble getting sound. The motherboard appears to be XP era with mostly USB connectors and onboard sound (the previous owner used XP on this system) and I'm not sure whether I'm better off looking for a driver to bring 98 up to speed or getting a dedicated sound card more in keeping with the 98 era.

Look up what brand and model of your motherboard on Google (or whatever search engine you use) to see if it has audio drivers for 98.

ampharos wrote:

A dedicated sound card only makes sense if you're running into compatibility issues (with DOS stuff) or it sounds horrible. You'd want an ISA card, but I doubt this machine would have the slots for it. (Recommended replacements if needed: SoundBlaster Live, Aureal Vortex 2)

A warning to those looking for Sound Blaster Live! cards: Most of the drivers are specific to the card's model, For example: I needed to use a driver disc ISO from Vogons Driver Library to get my CT4780 to work on 98SE because most of the other drivers I could find would refuse to output audio; On a CT4670 card I can get it to work just by using drivers from Creative's website since the Vogons drivers were incompatible.

Bottom line on this matter: Be sure to do research on the card model you find and what drivers it supports before spending money on a SB Live card to make sure it's perfectly compatible w/o any major flaws that could make it a pain to get working.

English Invader

Thank you to everyone for your help so far. I've found apparently suitable drivers for sound and graphics but I've had trouble getting them onto the system. Windows 98 won't read my CD-Rs and the files are too big for floppy disk. The good news is that the motherboard has an ethernet port so I could dig out my ethernet cable and use Puppy Linux to get the files and download them onto the hard drive. The motherboard also has a DB-25 null modem port and I have a couple of old XP laptops with DB-25s so I might be able to transfer files that way if I can find a suitable cable.

SomeGuy

English Invader wrote:

Windows 98 won't read my CD-Rs and the files are too big for floppy disk.

Make sure you are using the "ISO+Joliet" file system. Some CD burning software stupidly defaults to UDF.

NathanielHofer

English Invader wrote:

Thank you to everyone for your help so far. I've found apparently suitable drivers for sound and graphics but I've had trouble getting them onto the system. Windows 98 won't read my CD-Rs and the files are too big for floppy disk. The good news is that the motherboard has an ethernet port so I could dig out my ethernet cable and use Puppy Linux to get the files and download them onto the hard drive. The motherboard also has a DB-25 null modem port and I have a couple of old XP laptops with DB-25s so I might be able to transfer files that way if I can find a suitable cable.

You will need to somehow get cd drivers from a usb or floppy.

English Invader

The CD-R thing turned out to be a noob mistake on my part. I didn't realise I had to burn the files onto the disc (thought you only had to do that with audio CDs) but once I used Brasero to create a data disc Windows 98 had no trouble reading them.

Got the driver over and the system now displays a comfortable 800x600 resolution which opens up the game library a bit more. Thank you everyone for your help.