Win9x and ME RAM limit is 512 Mb.

there are patches so you can have more than 512MB ram installed but AFAIK the memory will be used up to 512MB... don't forget, 512MB is more than enough for 9x games 😀

You won't have any problems with the drive configs you are planning daibido1123 , but good luck getting a mobo for tualatin p3 that has support for 4 floppies... those that I've seen only support 2.
DVDRW drives work fine under 9x , not sure though if there are dvd burning progs that run on 9x

keropi wrote:

if there are dvd burning progs that run on 9x

Nero 6 as the example.

Ok, thanks, I guess I'll have to go with one 5.25 Floppy and one 3.5 Floppy, I was going to use them to do dub to CD/DVD anyway. Also finding Programs is not the issue, its finding hardware and patches. So of I'll go with the 512Mb route, still I need help finding a motherboard that can run the P3 1400S CPU and the Voodoo 5500 AGP GPU, So please help me in finding the right motherboard. also is it true that 98SE has a max Hard-drive recognition of 136GB? So what it boils down to, is I need help finding a compatible motherboard, hard drives, and CD-R/RW+DVD-R/RW drives. Lastly what wattage power-supply should I be looking at?

Every IDE cd/dvd drive should work great, for hard drives i would get maybe 80-120gb drives, they have enough space for most things. You propably can use a larger HD than 136gb, but only with unofficial patches I think, never tried anything bigger than 120gb on win9x. For PSU... get some good brand psu with atleast 250w and you should be good even if you add more stuff later.

you can use drives bigger than 136GB provided your BIOS supports them and you apply some unofficial patches as Aideka mentioned.
here is the thread for the win patches: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/78592-enable4 … -137gb-barrier/

I have a similar setup, 1.4ghz p3/v5500 agp , I am running them on an Asus TUSL2-C mobo, it works fine....

Win98 works with more than 512MB, you need to alter MaxPhysPage in win.ini or so... there is a large thread on MSFN on running win98 with more than 512MB ram, and even 2GB or more with patches.

It seems to be happiest with 1GB or less in my experience, as drivers weren't coded to work in the upper ram locations.

Would the ASUS MEB-VM - motherboard - micro ATX - Socket 370 - i440BX - Socket 370 Be a good motherboard, also would the Creative DVD-ROM Dxr3 6x be a good read drive for my build?

a 440BX mobo is always a good mobo 😀 the dvd is irrelevant, you can use whatever optical drive you want

Well I was asking, because I have read that, that DVD drive is a great one, when you can get it to work, sense it comes with a dedicated DVD codec decoder PCI card. So my question is should I get it as the read drive, or skip it? Sense there is a LAN war that goes on in my town that has a section dedicated to retro games and retro LAN competition, so watching DVD's would be nice between battles.

daibido1123 wrote:

The Drive specs I'm looking to do with this machine is to have two Hard drives, two optical drives, two 3.5 floppy drives, and two 5.25 floppy drives. the reason for this configurations, is not just for games, but also for dubbing the older floppy games to CD/DVD, and to back-up CD/DVD old games, so if the disk degrades/breaks, its backed-up

You don't need two optical drives to duplicate an optical disk. In fact, that's a pretty bad idea and it probably won't work very well. The usual procedure is to copy the contents of a disk to a hard drive (specifically, by making an "image" of the disk) and then write the copied contents from the hard drive to a blank disk.

daibido1123 wrote:

Would the ASUS MEB-VM - motherboard - micro ATX - Socket 370 - i440BX - Socket 370 Be a good motherboard, also would the Creative DVD-ROM Dxr3 6x be a good read drive for my build?

daibido1123 wrote:

that DVD drive is a great one, when you can get it to work, sense it comes with a dedicated DVD codec decoder PCI card.

If I'm not mistaken, the decoder card and the optical drive are two separate components, and one does not require the other.

Secondly, those decoder cards are really only useful for very, very slow systems; a Pentium III-1400 should be plenty fast enough to play DVDs at full speed. Besides, I think the Voodoo 5 has some decoding capability itself. Since it's still not a very powerful system, I would suggest using Geexbox for DVD playback.

no problem. 😀

I used to watch DVDs with a P3-500MHz laptop with a built-in ATi rage 128 video card, worked great without a hardware decoder card. On the other hand, I also had a P3 mobile 1GHz with a trident video card and it had problems playing the same DVDs, so it actually depends a lot on whether the video card has DVD hardware assist.

Those hardware cards are actually for sub-400MHz computers, after that video cards began picking up on that task.

Any one know a good SCSI card to use , I have a Dreamcast Developer kit, as well as an XBox, PS1/PS2 Dev kit, all use SCSI connectors to link to a computer, luckily my older Dev kits use 9Pin or 25Pin.

SCSI can be a nightmare to deal with.

I suggest you consult other owners of those developer kits for advice on the most practical cards for your purposes.

Jorpho is dead on here. I know SCSI quite well and have for years, but when I saw your question and tried to form a quick but concise answer, I went whoooooaaaa.... I forgot just how much stuff there is to SCSI cuz I'm so used to it... and there's so many things you can get wrong and thus cause all kinds of havoc and nonfunctionality. if IDE was checkers, SCSI would be 3D chess.

It's not a Pentium 3, but apparently the ASRock 775 Dual VSTA or something close is a core 2 duo motherboard that will actually run win98 because there are drivers available to run it. It has both AGP and PCIe slots (the latter CAN work on win98 with one model of nvidia i think the 8800gt or 8800gts), IDE and SATA, DDR1 and DDR2 slots.

I was planning on using one myself eventually for a multibooting system (it also runs Mac OSX 10.5 and everything up thru 7) for a retro-centric machine able to be the ultimate wni98 system.

Note more RAM is slower on win98se - patches or not, 512meg is slower than 128meg which is slower than 32meg. (I dont know how much of a difference, just that every page of ram needs to be placed and juggled around in lower ram somehow, and I don't know if a faster cpu overrides all this or if it causes some kind of stuttering... just remember reading when designing up my ultra 98 box.)

Although I still like 3dfx, such a card is no longer necessary with GLIDE wrappers giving higher performance and AA rates. It also wont work on the above mobo since it's an 8x AGP, not a 2x/4x 3.3v like the voodoo requires.

hifidelitygaming wrote:

Note more RAM is slower on win98se - patches or not, 512meg is slower than 128meg which is slower than 32meg. (I dont know how much of a difference, just that every page of ram needs to be placed and juggled around in lower ram somehow, and I don't know if a faster cpu overrides all this or if it causes some kind of stuttering... just remember reading when designing up my ultra 98 box.)

Interesting but don't think thats true unless using older Socket 7 (something less than K6-3) or a PII rig as it always was a limitation of cacable area of the motherboard/cpu. For older S7 rigs it was usually found it needed to be 64MBs or less. Early PII (440LX?) worked best with 128MB or less.

I use a P3 1.4-S with a i815 (NON B-Step) that is loaded up with 512MB and works faster than I ever expected. I've even used 768MB without complaint on a Via Apollo Pro 133A board. As mentioned above make sure to set a Vcache setting of 70% or less than installed ram.

Best MEM tweaks under 98SE with large amounts of memory (256MB+)
1. Max Vcache of 70% of installed ram
2. ConservativeSwapFileUsage=1 (in system.ini)
3. Dynamic swapfile (default settings of 0-no max as it will usually use no swapfile with tweak 2 but still around if needed)

There's tons of tweaks as I've spent months fine tuning W98SE to my liking but has been fun all the way!!

hifidelitygaming wrote:

It's not a Pentium 3, but apparently the ASRock 775 Dual VSTA or something close is a core 2 duo motherboard that will actually run win98 because there are drivers available to run it.

Win98 Drivers for Core2 motherboard? Hmmm... that's something new. Can you post here the link, please?

It's possible that less ram isnt slower, but I remember reading it endlessly back in the day. Something about how win98 organizes slices of memory past the first few megs, and the more unused ram there is, the more juggling it has to do to do something with the used ram.

As to win98 drivers, i'm sorry I dont' have them handy right now... however! I should have them again when I build up a PC based on it cuz I have one of the motherboards (thats why I got it) and I just need to dig up on the old PC where the drivers were previously. 😀 Alternately that MSFN group (the die hard win98 guys) should know, as they were one talking about it as being one of if not the best win98 board due to being core 2 duo.

I think that the chipsets used are standard things like you find some drivers from intel's site, and you find some other for the on board network, or whatever it was, but nearly all or all of the on board hardware did have win98 drivers for it.