I have good memories of Windows XP SP2 running AM2 and Socket 939 systems..
But Windows 98SE? Hm. The last system I remember running that OS when it was current was a Pentium III @733 MHz with an Nvidia graphics card.

Edit: On a second thought, that's not very helpful, though. 🤷‍♂️
Has anybody else some more experience with Windows 98SE on XP era hardware?

Jo22 wrote on 2023-09-23, 14:53:

I have good memories of Windows XP SP2 running AM2 and Socket 939 systems..
But Windows 98SE? Hm. The last system I remember running that OS when it was current was a Pentium III @733 MHz with an Nvidia graphics card.

Well, I think that's a more existential point about retro machines, though. (Retro DOS/Windows machines, specifically - vintage Macs don't work that way) Namely, the fact that the hardware on which you might want to run a given OS/software as a retro system is not the hardware one would have used at the time. The best Win98 systems are what I would call middling XP systems from ~2004; the best XP systems are sandy/ivy bridges from 2012 that people would have run 7 and 10 on. Etc.

The biggest reason, indeed, that most systems with reasonable retro potential went to the e-waste pile is that people view them as mediocre systems for the current OS and software rather than retro systems for 2-3 OSes earlier. I will tell anybody who listens that the biggest mistake I made ordering a Dell PIII 700 (that, sadly, I no longer have) in the summer of 2000 was checking the 98SE box instead of Win2000. Took me until Christmas to wipe my boot partition and fix that mistake. I have not touched 9x-family OSes on my machines since then. But while 98SE was a piece of trash for actual real world use in fall 2000, I admit that I am intrigued by playing with it on a retro system... and, with hindsight, I wouldn't have e-wasted that Dell system if the idea of using it as a retro 98SE system had occurred to me, but at the time it got e-wasted in the early 2010s, it was seen as a mediocre XP system. And who wanted a 700MHz system with AGP, 768 megs of RAM, and no SATA for XP in the early 2010s?

Also, the best retro parts are often parts that one wouldn't have wanted at the time. e.g. who could imagine that, if you were looking at 2007-era motherboards, the LGA775 boards with i865 DDR1/AGP would end up being highly desirable 15 years later, while the LGA775 i965 or P35 DDR2/PCI-E that you would have wanted at the time boards are very... meh... for retro stuff. Too modern for 98SE, and outperformed by cheap sandy/ivy bridges for XP, they only really make sense if you've already had them in a closet for a decade. Same with sound cards - an SB Audigy is probably more desirable than an X-Fi because the Audigy has DOS/98SE/etc compatibility and the X-Fi does not. Or video cards - the retro community likes the NVIDIA FX5xxx series, while at the time, that was the worst product NVIDIA had ever released and everybody had ATI 9700/9800s. Same with the motherboards that triggered this post - what idiot would have wanted an AGP/DDR1 system with a VIA chipset with temperamental SATA support for an AM2 system in, oh, 2007-8? And yet, here we are...

Hm. I assume it's all a bit relative. Newer isn't automatically better, but sometimes the removal of bottlenecks makes things run smoother.

I'm thinking of real VGA cards vs GPUs with a legacy VGA core, traditional CPUs vs multi-core CPUs, ISA/VLB vs PCI/AGP vs PCIe etc.

Let's take the venerable Pentium IV, for example. It's a hothead, but has a very high single core performance.
For a single core/single CPU OS like Windows 98SE, that dated CPU might be still among the best.

Likewise, Windows XP has a very limited scheduler. It's ability of scalability is very humble in comparison to Vista+.
So a hexa core CPU with low speed cores might be worse than an old quad core CPU with fast cores.

Then, there are instruction sets that were lost to time.
Like AMD's 3DNow! extension (some sort of MMX competitor).
It is removed from all recent CPU designs of the last 15 years.
But a few old games may depend on that.
So yeah, I guess it's all relative, I'm afraid. 😔

Jo22 wrote on 2023-09-23, 15:48:

Let's take the venerable Pentium IV, for example. It's a hothead, but has a very high single core performance.
For a single core/single CPU OS like Windows 98SE, that dated CPU might be still among the best.

Sure, but if you could get a motherboard that works fine in 98SE, wouldn't say, a Pentium E6800 or C2D E8600 massively outperform any Pentium 4 on single-core performance?

The Pentium 4's advantage isn't really its raw performance - it's that it is among the highest performing options for which Win98-friendly chipsets/peripherals/etc are easy to find and pair with it.

Jo22 wrote on 2023-09-23, 15:48:

Likewise, Windows XP has a very limited scheduler. It's ability of scalability is very humble in comparison to Vista+.
So a hexa core CPU with low speed cores might be worse than an old quad core CPU with fast cores.

Sure, but I think a less-old-quad-core with faster cores will outperform an older dual/quad-core with less fast cores at XP or, indeed, any OS.

(And really, more-but-slower cores is not a recipe that's generally worked out too well for desktop/gaming/etc, is it? It's great for servers, sure, and for scammy low-end junk that gets advertised as 'quad core' when in reality the thing has less performance than a single-core CPU from a decade earlier...)

I think the general point that you are making, though, which is a good one, is that higher-performance/lower-core-count is generally desirable for a retro system. e.g. if you were to compare an E8600 (the E8700, while listed on wikipedia, seems hard to find) with a Q8200, my guess is that most retro workloads will probably prefer the two much-higher-clocked cores of the E8700 over the two extra cores of the Q8200. But if you compare the E8600 with a 3770k, I would presume the 3770k wins big time. Same if you compare the E8600 with an i7-960 six-core.

The more I look at that Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 board, the more I am liking what I see... seems like everything other than maybe the AC97 audio should be supported in 98SE?

The CPU support list does seem very weird, though.

Hi again, there is something that came to mind.

If memory serves, some Pentium III PCs were also being used by RARE during development of the second Starfox game for N64 (Dinosaur Planet).

I don't know anymore where I got this information from, though.
I suppose I once read an article or saw some pictures, not sure.

So please take it with a grain of salt. My memory is a bit sketchy here. 🤷‍♂️

Anyway, it just came to mind. No idea why.

Btw, the unfinished game seems to run fine in an older N64 emulator on Windows 98, with actual hardware being weaker than a Pentium III.

So it seems plausible at leadt, that a Pentium III was sufficient enough for development.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-23, 17:59:

The more I look at that Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 board, the more I am liking what I see... seems like everything other than maybe the AC97 audio should be supported in 98SE?

The CPU support list does seem very weird, though.

AC97 is supported in 98SE, you can find drivers for it all over the internet.

VivienM wrote on 2023-09-23, 17:59:

The more I look at that Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 board, the more I am liking what I see... seems like everything other than maybe the AC97 audio should be supported in 98SE?

The CPU support list does seem very weird, though.

Back in the day I used a Asrock n68u with Windows 98,for a while. CPU was a Sempron, later upgraded to a Athlon64. Video card was discrete, nVidia, I forgot the model, maybe 7300. I upgraded to Windows XP when I upgraded the cpu again, to a Athlon x2. I still have that board, now with a Athlon X4, and a nVidia 605. If you want to use am2 platform for Windows 98,I see no reason not to, if you use a single core cpu and ide hdd,and if the drivers for the chipset are available. I find it a better platform than skt 775.