windows 98 Windows 98 Build

[JoshuaKoe]

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: WINDOWS 98

I want to build a brand new Windows 98 PC for retro games and floppy discs. any specs recommendations?

 

[WhitetailAni]

Pentium III over Pentium II
Max 512MB of RAM
Get a Slot 1 board

~80GB HDD
Optical drive, DVD-ROM drive is better

1.44MB floppy over 720K floppy

Sound card

GeForce 4 or similar

[JoshuaKoe]

3 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

Pentium III over Pentium II
Max 512MB of RAM
Get a Slot 1 board

~80GB HDD
Optical drive, DVD-ROM drive is better

1.44MB floppy over 720K floppy

Sound card

GeForce 4 or similar

can I use a newer pentium cpu with a newer board with integrated audio?

[JoshuaKoe]

Just now, JoshuaKoe said:

can I use a newer pentium cpu with a newer board with integrated audio?

sorry accidentally replied

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, JoshuaKoe said:

can I use a newer pentium with a newer board with integrated audio?

You can, but the newer you go the higher the chance you get of weird incompatibility.

Which Pentium is it?

[JoshuaKoe]

2 minutes ago, FakeKGB said:

You can, but the newer you go the higher the chance you get of weird incompatibility.

Which Pentium is it?

the Intel Pentium 4 540 or Pentium Gold G4400

[WhitetailAni]

Just now, JoshuaKoe said:

the Intel Pentium 4 540 or Pentium Gold G4400

The G4400 is definitely not compatible - was released in 2015.

The 540 might. I don't know if Windows 98 SE (you are using 98 SE, right?) supports hyperthreading.

[JoshuaKoe]

Just now, FakeKGB said:

The G4400 is definitely not compatible - was released in 2015.

The 540 might. I don't know if Windows 98 SE (you are using 98 SE, right?) supports hyperthreading.

yeah 98SE. If it doesn't work probably would go to 2000 or XP

[JoshuaKoe]

and probably would chuck the GeForce 7200 GS in there too

[Master Disaster]

98 SE has 2 limitations as far as hardware goes.

 

CPUs over 2.2Ghz can cause weird behaviour and instabilities. The system might boot fine but some things might crash when you try to run them.

 

It can use up to 511MB of RAM by default though you can change a setting in the win.ini which allows it to use up to 1GB. Can't remember the specifics but I'm sure Google knows.

 

Some other quirks, it doesn't work with SATA drives unless the board has the option to run them in IDE mode and USB support can be flaky, 1.0 is fine, 1.1 is hit or miss, 2.0 or higher doesn't work at all.

 

The other concern is driver support, if you use a motherboard that's too new there won't be any chipset drivers or audio drivers available.

[Archer42]

May be I've been unlucky, but in my experience sound is kind of a pain.

Relatively modern stuff does not have drivers, time-appropriate motherboards do not always have sound and time-appropriate pci sound cards are relatively uncommon since they quickly became worse than integrated solutions and were thrown away.

 

There is basically no hope in getting 2010+ hw running, it is pointless, the os itself might function, but without drivers what good would it be?