|
Post by zellsf on Mar 4, 2019 3:51:52 GMT -5
edmonddantes is thinking of 64-bit Windows, which was an option on XP, but not particularly popular. I considered that, but no one sets up a PC for games with Windows XP 64-bit. PCem is great, but you're emulating a Pentium II + Voodoo2 SLI at best, which really only is good enough for really early 3D gaming (and 2D gaming of course, though without need for 3D acceleration virtualization might be a better choice).
I haven't really found a single use case for it personally.
|
|
|
Post by zerker on Mar 4, 2019 16:28:16 GMT -5
You strictly speaking don't have to partition drives (and by the way this is something you still have to do with virtualizers in my experience)... its just that its usually a good idea. However if your hard drive is like 40gb or less you don't have to worry about partitioning, just make sure its formatted in FAT32 (and Windows 98 basically does this automatically) If you're setting up a retro PC nowadays, it's about a 50-50 chance that the drive you are trying to install is already FAT32, or is even partitioned at all. If it isn't, you'll need to run fdisk. Thankfully, fdisk isn't too bad, as far as partitioners go. I'm about 80% certain the Windows 98 installer requires an already partitioned and formatted drive, but I can't recall what it will do if it sees a drive already fully partitioned as NTFS, for example.
|
|
|
Post by edmonddantes on Mar 7, 2019 10:40:34 GMT -5
Win98 in my experience can see extra drives but will think they're blank/unformatted if they're not FAT... I could be remembering wrong because I also recall its installer not seeing NTFS drives at all.
Only problem with Fdisk is the version built into Win98 (even SE) has problems reporting the correct amount of space on bigger drives. Like, if you tell it "partition 30% of the drive" it'll get the correct amount of space, but then might come back and tell you that the 30% is the entire drive.
There is a way around this tho. Several actually--for example, you can format the drive ahead of time in a modern Windows system (using connectors to plug it, say, to a Laptop's USB port) or there is even simply a fixed downloadable Fdisk which corrects this issue.
|
|
|
Post by zerker on Mar 7, 2019 19:06:57 GMT -5
Oh, for sure. Setting up a Windows 98 machine generally involves researching its limitations and trying your best to stay within them. Shouldn't be a problem if you are using a flash memory converter, but for actual mechanical drives, it will probably be too big, and require workarounds.
Too much ram is the other quite well known problem. General rule of thumb is to keep it at 512 MB or under. I've got 192 MB on my machine, which seems like a good number. Thankfully (and surprisingly), you can still buy new SDRAM if you need it. I saw both 512 MB and 128 MB sticks on Newegg when I just checked.
|
|
|
Post by edmonddantes on Mar 8, 2019 21:03:32 GMT -5
Yeah, there's tons of SDRAM out there and I'm always shocked how cheap it is. On my machines I just maxed out both because there is no kill like overkill. Win98 can't see more than 512mb unless you use fanmade updates (which I had to do on my Dell since I wanted 1gb for its XP partition, tho even with that upgrade it maxed out at 1gb).
Now, I've heard using a Solid State drive or Flash Drive isn't a good idea because of... something. I forget the details, something about how the same areas can only be written to so many times before they're unusable. Normal hard drives don't have this issue. Since defragmenting is important on older OSes this could be a reason to use a normal mechanical hard drive.
Another thing is BIOS limitations. My Dell pretty modern but any time I try to plug in a 2tb external drive--even if I boot up a Linux LiveCD first--it can't see it. This isn't an OS limitation, the BIOS of the motherboard itself literally can't see something that big. I think most older PCs can handle 1tb tho, and for Windows 98SE what one could do is dual-partition, dedicating 40gb to Windows 98SE and the rest to Windows XP or Linux or whatever--very convenient if, like me, you do a lot of writing in Windows (I just like older Wordpad more) then need to put it on a laptop to upload to the internet.
|
|
|
Post by starscream on Mar 8, 2019 21:58:42 GMT -5
Flash drives including SSDs have a limited amount of write cycles and thus a limited lifespan just because of that. Win98 also doesn't have support for the TRIM command that modern SSDs use to prevent performance losses. It's probably not an issue for an OS just used for Retrogaming, unless you write your ISO collection daily to the drive or use the bare minimum size for Win98. You also don't defragment those flash drives, it's not recommended to do that.
|
|
|
Post by edmonddantes on Mar 8, 2019 23:28:37 GMT -5
I can't imagine running Win98 without ever defragmenting tho, unless something about SSDs prevents fragmentation in the first place?
|
|
|
Post by Weasel on Mar 9, 2019 2:09:29 GMT -5
I can't imagine running Win98 without ever defragmenting tho, unless something about SSDs prevents fragmentation in the first place? SSDs have no seek time, since there are no moving parts on them. Fragmented data is a bigger problem with mechanical drives, since accessing one file can sometimes require the read-head to seek back and forth between many disparate sectors just to get one complete file, depending on how fragmented it is. With an SSD, one needs only page the correct memory cell, which takes no time at all.
|
|