Well since I'm quarantined with covid-19 for another 8 days I need something to keep me busy.

I have not had a Win 98 gaming pc in a long time and I want to have a go with the most powerful hardware that I have that is compatible with Windows 98.

I want to play some old games, yea I can play some of the games on Windows 10 via steam or GOG but I think the original version Half-Life looks better than the version on steam. Plus I have a ton of other games and demos I want to install and do not want to repurchase them.

Specs:

Asus K8V Deluxe socket 754 motherboard.
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Clawhammer CPU.
512 mb DDR ram
40 gb seagate barracuda hard drive.
BFG Geforce 7800 GS OC one of the fastest AGP cards that is Windows 98 compatible ( BFG modded a Nvidia driver to work with Win 98 since Nvidia did not make one for the 7800 gpu and I still have the box and driver cd for the video card)
Dvd drive
1.4mb floppy.
IBM 17" CRT monitor that does 1280 x 1024
430 Watt power supply
Rosewill gaming case.
Soundblaster Live! sound card.
Pci Network card

Years ago I tried to run Windows 98 on this motherboard and it had issues with the onbard sound and the onboard gigabit lan.

The driver disk comes with Win98 drivers for everything but the onboard sound was crap and when I installed the driver for the onboard lan chipset it killed the Windows 98 install.

So this time I turned off onboard lan and sound.

I'm testing it out before I put it inside the case and am currently installing Win 98.

Hopefully this turns out a smoother install.

In!

Very similar specs to the first gaming PC I built, but I had XP.

I ran Xp 32 and 64bit on it back then, also Solaris and Linux.

I remember that the onboard lan worked best with Xp 32 bit and not so well on 64 bit.

Also I seem to remember issues with Linux.

After a few years there were improved drivers that mostly were ok.

Digging through my stuff I found a Linksys pci wifi adapter that has a Win 98 driver.

Never used wi-fi on windows 98 before.

It's starting to piss me off.

I can't get any pci cards detected at all.

So I guess technically windows 98 will run on this board but something is not right.

I did mess around in the bios to make sure the settings were good.

But it looks like Win 98 on this board is a no go.

Im going to throw a Winxp install on it to see if its an issue with win98 or if its an hardware issue with the pci slots.

That pretty much sounds like the PC I got on my desk now, except I have the Athlon 64 s939 4000+ with 4GB DDR, and two 320GB drives in a raid 0.  I think there's a geForce 8900 in there with 1GB RAM.  In a first-gen Lian-Li case, with a window I installed myself.

I have a 15" Zing CRT that'll do 1600x1200.    Currently have it connected to an AST 486dx2/66.

You'll need to make sure you have drivers to facilitate the wifi connection.  Probably won't work with WPA/WPA2, might have to use WEP or no encryption.  Probably best to setup another WAP on its own VLAN to isolate it from the rest of the network.

Oh the joys of old pc hardware, looks like all the pci slots are dead.

XP does not see any pci cards either.

Took out the the AGP card and plugged a pci SIS video card and no video.

It's dead Jim.

The board is not totally useless since I can still use the onboard sound and lan with a newer os than Win 98.

Thinking about adding another 512 mb and just installing Windows 2000 and use the onboard sound and lan.

I have other boards/pc's I can use for a Win 98 box just not nearly as fast.

Pentium 3 933 mhz, AMD K6-2 550  Mhz in a socket 7 board, a Pentium 3 500 slot 1 board.

I'll think about it tonight.

I have spare boards... of various socket types.   Heh, apparently so do you.  I still have the two fastest socket 7 systems built and together in the basement.  They both use Epox motherboards.  One is the MVP3-G2 the other is the MVP3-G5, with 1 and 2MB of cache.  The G2 has an AMD K6-2 550, and the G5 has an AMD K6-III 450, clocked at 500mhz, and it's stable.  

If you're gonna use 2k, why not just do XP?  

I have faster hardware that will run XP better plus its been years since I ran Windows 2000.

My super seven board is also a Epox EP-MPV3G5 currently running MSDOS 6.22

I don't feel like messing with it any more so back in the box it goes.

Still thinking on what to do for my old games, maybe just go with good ol XP.

I need to put something together to play Screamer2.  That was a favorite game of mine back in the day.

I have a 2k machine that I still use for my Commodore D64 imaging and JP1 remote programming, just never moved the software off it to something else.  But, I can also do D64 imaging on an XP machine and 486 DOS machine in the basement.  

With covid kicking my ass I just did not have any energy to mess with this, hopefully my energy pops back up since i'm on steroids and anti nausea meds.

I'm already feeling better.