I'm doing a new i7 build this week and consequently reinstalling all my OSes from scratch. I'll have 2 bootable hard drives as follows: Boot drive 1: XP Pro, Vista Ultimate - Using the Vista bootloader Boot drive 2: Win98SE/DOS, (K)ubuntu - Using GRUB bootloader I have the Windows 7 Beta installed on this system, but I've used the beta enough to report a few bugs and to know that I like it, so I won't be installing it on the new system until it gets a retail release. I'm a bit particular about how I organise my drives and partitions and I like to boot silently to XP by default, so I'll keep XP, Vista and any other NT-based OSes on their own drive with their own bootloader, while putting everything else onto the other boot drive with GRUB. I switch between boot drives at BIOS POST via the motherboard's own boot-menu. I have some unallocated space left over on both boot drives and I'm looking for suggestions as to other OSes I could install to try out and familiarise myself with or just others that are handy to have. Other distros of Linux different enough from (k/x)Ubuntu to offer a new learning experience, Mac OS X via a hack, alternate versions of Windows? I'd also like something extremely lightweight that I can use when I want to get to the 'net ASAP, such as a slimmed-down Linux distro, but I'm not familiar with any of them other than Linpus, so recommendations of other distros or methods of slimming down Ubuntu would be very welcome. As above, I installed 98SE onto the 2nd boot drive with the intention of using it for games that are too old for XP but too new for DOSBox (Mechwarrior 2/3, Dungeon Keeper 2, etc) and as an emergency, quick-booting OS for system recovery, but 98SE refuses to boot with my current C2D system. The boot process hangs at the driver-loading stage, though the loading bar continues to animate, albeit slowly. Obviously, getting 98SE-compatible drivers for modern hardware isn't easy, but I was hoping to at least get to the desktop before I encountered any show-stoppers. I modified the VCache settings to get around the 98SE problem with having more RAM than 512MB, but it still won't play ball, so I'm pretty sure it's a driver problem. Advice would be appreciated there, too. Linux does a better job as an emergency-OS when I need to fix things, so I'm really just itching to get 98SE installed for the old games and for the challenge. Thanks in advance for any advice.
You should try NT 4.0 and NT 3.51 definitely! See these links (and look for other sites on Google): http://www.geocities.com/bearwindows/ http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/ http://erpman1.tripod.com/ http://www.mdgx.com/wnt4.htm About the Win98 issues... It does not support multiprocessor, so you'll have to disable your second core. Also it will have serious problems with much memory. Oh, and it's not really comatible with nowaday's chipsets. See these: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=107001 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=97588
I have Win98 on Virtual PC. If I set it 1GB of RAM.. it says I don't have enough RAM, if I put 999MB it works. Win98 can only support 999MB, anything above won't make it boot. Did you try Vista/Win7 compatibility mode of these games. Unlike XP crap thing, it actually does the translation. I have some old games that did not work for XP, which works under Vista. Some of the game required "NT patch", where it's some programmers that re-made the the main exe (and sometimes other files) from 16-bit to 32-bit.
Thanks for the suggestions mm vr, I'll have a look through those sites. I can get Win98SE working fine in VirtualPC, but I need direct access to hardware, rather than virtualisation, so that I can make use of Direct3D. I haven't tried getting Mechwarrior 3 working under Vista or 7 yet, but I doubt it'll work any better than in XP. The problem is that the game loads and runs fine, but is prone to frequent crashes to desktop, odd in-game glitches (vehicles bouncing miles into the air for no apparent reason) and timing issues. For all anyone knows its problems could be down to modern hardware as much as the OS, but the game was written for 98SE and supposedly works under it, while it doesn't under XP or Vista. Heavy Gear 2 suffers from similar glitches, but using compatibility modes did even less for that game. When I get Vista installed this week I'll try using the compatibility modes, but my hopes aren't high
I know there is no Direct 3D under Virtual PC... my point is that if you install Win98SE on your system.. your 4GB of RAM will most probably prevent the OS to boot, and get prompted that you need more RAM, until you remove RAM stick to get under 1GB. By the way under Virtual PC, Windows 2000 and XP boots way faster than Win98. and Win98 took me about 1 hours on my laptop to install (under Virtual PC). (my laptop is a Dell Latitude E6400, with an Intel Core 2 duo 2.26GHz P8400, 4GB machine, 160GB Hitachi 5200RPM HDD)
That problem can usually (though not always) be circumvented by modifying the system.ini under [386enh] and [vcache] to limit 98's use of the available system ram, I've gotten around that one before. The problem in my case is related to drivers, I'm having trouble narrowing down which driver is causing the boot process to hang. Who knows, I might get lucky and it'll boot okay on a Core i7 & X58
MenuetOS may be worth a look - I've not tried it myself, but it would seem to tick the boxes you're looking at.
