Installing Windows 98 on a Modern Laptop

recently I started wanting to play around with Windows 98 kind of a nostalgia slash technical nerdy experiment thing you know what I'm trying to say of course you can grab a computer from the era and I did a lot of them still work especially when it comes to doing things from the era but they're a little clunky and even with they're much simpler operating system not all that fast I mean that's not exactly groundbreaking information but I started to think what if they were all that fast and all not less that clunky of course that might be part of the charm depending on your nostalgic brew but I got to thinking what if it was running on brand-new hardware and I'm not talking about a virtual machine I mean on the metal running natively on the hardware could that really be done now you might be thinking windows 98 is like super old dude and with how powerful computers are now Matt of course windows 98 can run on a new computer you goober idiot as a matter of fact you're right Intel CPUs are more or less completely backwards compatible all the way back to the 808 e6 from 1978 they even start up in 16-bit real mode to this day that's right your $3,000 gaming rig with 12 cores 64-bit CPU when 64 gigs of RAM still spends the first few seconds when you started out as a 16-bit computer with access to only one megabyte of memory until your BIOS or Windows kicks it up to 64-bit mode the problem with modern hardware is really everything else if you've ever built your own computer or reinstalled Windows you're probably familiar with the concept of installing drivers and you know how many windows 98 drives have been released in the last 15 years so very says these only DOS space and Windows versions also struggle a little with too much memory this house kind of ridiculous now but indeed in an era where 64 megabytes was impressive there wasn't much thought to memory amount there were over 1 gigabyte [Music] luckily you can limit the amount of memory windows can see in software so you don't have to start removing or replacing RAM sticks to get under the threshold and this is indeed the official solution no patch or update you just can't I more than one gig deal with it so basically why you think old software would have no problem running on newer hardware it's really usually the other way around well newer software will be slow on old hardware it usually at least supports the hardware and knows how to deal with it loosely so why bother doing this when I'm pretty sure it's not gonna go that well I don't know but you know what they say working the technology is like a box of chocolates as in delicious and should be eaten in moderation let's install windows this is a ThinkPad t4 17 it's about a year and a half old but whatever perfectly modern enough for our tests he respects if you're interested now currently this thing is running Windows 10 and I don't yet feel like wiping it for Windows 98 so I'm gonna add another condition to this I want to run Windows 98 from USB well this will certainly be interesting as far as I know ms-dos never supported USB in Windows 98 can't even read USB flash drives without installing a driver but you can run dos off a USB I know that because Rufus knows that yes my good friend of Rufus who's full of all sorts of neat tricks including making a bootable dos USB I want to find out more about how this works I figure if dos can run off the USB then DOS based windows can - but I need to know whether dos really is running off the USB or if it's just some floppy disk emulation or something my first impulse was to test in VMware so that I wouldn't have to get up but it turns out that neither it nor VirtualBox support booting from USB at least not in BIOS mode dan maybe I'll have to get up after all or maybe not a quick google search found plop brutal uder a small program that runs off CD or floppy and Dedan lets you brute to other things which actually worked nice we're officially in free DOS and what do you know it really is running off the USB as far as dos is concerned the USB Drive is it's C Drive this is looking good something that's nice about the windows 98 installer is it really can run anywhere provided it's loaded from das so I can literally copy the Installer files onto the flash drive run it from the flash drive and use it to install windows on the same flash drive which helps since modern laptops often don't you have a CD drive also since the Installer is running from Dossett should carry over this their parent USB support at least for now alright let's give it a shot I'm back in Frieda I'm gonna try running the Windows 98 installer hey nice we're in scan disk remember this but it's kind of slow I guess that's what I get for running from the USB now technically you can't start the setup for that running scan disk or at least that's what they want you to think but this is the DOS era there's nothing you can't do with some well place switches on the command prompt the setup actually has several of these but for now we're only interested in this skipping scan disk here we go okay not what I expected I was stumped for a while here I kept trying different switches and kept getting the same disk errors until I realized the USB is indeed right protected it's purely read-only at first I thought Rufus's magical DOS USB was indeed too good to be true but actually it isn't the problem was in fact plopp bootloader which in the interest of making it small and floppy disk size it contains no right routines for its USB drivers that's a bummer and what I can tell there's no other way to boot directly from USB in a virtual machine so here we go I'm getting up don't try and stop me it's time to start testing on the roof first things first I gotta change the boot mode to compatibility mode because dulse booting just isn't as fashionable anymore alright let's plug in the USB and nice boots first try score one real computers well let's get started okay this actually isn't that unexpected remember what I said about 16-bit real mode only having access to about one megabyte of RAM that's where we are now and the set up ones are whopping the reef well two point eight to access more memory we're gonna need to install a DOS driver back in the day this was usually high mem dot sis but it's a little buggy and contributes to a lot of those memory issues I mentioned earlier plus I already tried it and it didn't work luckily a bunch of community may alternatives exist such as X MGR and hi Memex first I'm gonna try hi mem X because I read about a lot of people having success with it all we have to do is copy it to the USB and add it to config dot sis only things were still that easy hi mam X gets a little further in the setup but still eventually Windows was asking for the real high mem to stand up well X MGR it is let's see what happens [Music] oh so close yet so far what a tease what if I just gone out and bought two point eight megabytes of RAM only for it to then ask for an additional thirteen point two if only I knew they were actually 500 times that amount in this computer I tried a bunch of different set up switches and XM VR configurations but nothing worked I kept getting stuck at this error message but eventually I stumbled upon something else something magical a bunch of them actually switches for the windows 98 set up the kind of switches Donald Trump would build a wall to keep out these switches are completely undocumented yeah I don't know why I didn't know about these before I guess because they're undocumented but it turns out that's like a hundred switches that the setup makes no mention of in its help and we're interested in one particular one /nm for no minimum this bypasses all checks for minimum hardware and just barrels along with the Installer and even the touchpad works out of the box which I probably shouldn't be surprised about but I am well it's finally time to install windows 98 and also readjust the camera it really is fascinating seeing the windows 98 setup on such a modern computer I won't make you sit through the entire setup but this first stage went flawlessly now let me just say this first stage looks a lot like Windows but it isn't Windows 98 it actually looks a lot closer to a stripped-down Windows 3 it's a little more tied to dos than Windows 98 selfies but the second stage is 98 and of course this first stage makes a bunch of changes to the disk and the boot process and often installs its own hi nemesis which is much older in this case so suffice to say I don't quite expect the second stage to start flawlessly but let's see what happens oh look at this classic startup screen in fact you can look at it for a long time because it never changes indeed Windows is once again having trouble starting up looking at the USB you can see that indeed Windows has its own high mem dose it's that it's probably using instead of our replacement stopping it out with that new one should fix that right up all right let's try this out you can see X MGR loads during starla and yeah we're in stage 2 of the windows 98 setup so by this point things were going really well but it's also the point where things started to go downhill after does a few things like look for plug-and-play hardware good luck and a bunch of other stuff it gets to this infamous updating system settings section symbolized by this somewhat jittery drumbeat this usually takes a stupidly long time at least on hardware for the era and here it isn't all that fast but the problem is this suddenly something crashed now I've never seen this happen before it's obviously not supposed to happen also the crash dump is missing the letter U and the letter Y which is really weird well at this point there isn't much I can do except ignore it and hope it doesn't happen again but it did again and again things kept crashing and I had no idea why when the setup finally completed it just hung I left it for minutes and no change eventually I decided to a hard reset well I'm not feeling very hurtful about this install but let's see what happens the first thing it did was detected birkin registry and also made a run scan rig which alright okay I don't know what's typing this gibberish into the prompts what's running in the audio exec ah-ha-ha literally the gibberish this is supposed to be readable or empty what the hell is going on sorry I ran scan rig and it said it fixed things but as I learned from years of watching house m.d. everybody lies next boot it told me the exact same thing in fact never stopped telling me this I thought I may as well just try to boot I mean can't be any more broken than it already is Desktop further than I expected ah that's more like it well it didn't get any further than this which honestly seems about right the real question is what in the [ __ ] happened it was all looking so promising up until then well although crashes and gibberish and missing letters reeked of file corruption and its really completely possible that the USB is just broken so in order to rule out the simplest doctrine I did it all again trying a newest SanDisk flash drive instead of the store-brand one from dick smith yes the real name of the store but even after doing everything again it was still the same deal completely smooth up until the very last moment just like me when I flew it well I had no clue but I did have sort of an idea having ruled out the USB itself I started thinking about memory again specifically since the first crash dump mentioned page faults as kind of a shot in the dark yeah I did read about people having success with high Memex so I thought what if I start the first stage with xmg aha and then swap it out with high MMX for stage two and yes this is a lot more complicated than it means to me but you know what it actually worked with high mem X in the second stage it happily drummed along all the way to the end with no issues so yeah I wasn't lying there was weird with memory it's been pretty much the cause of every problem so far alright guys prepare for the first boot fingers crossed looking good we've got a cursor I got a mouse cursor and the classic ritual of going through plug and play devices it found and here we go and the Welcome app thing for reference this is what it's supposed to look like and I was on a considerably less powerful machine but hey you can't really blame it it's got new graphics drivers apart from the default generic VGA one unfortunately as I alluded to earlier locating drivers is really what's gonna be the big problem you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that Lenovo hasn't dropped windows 98 drivers for this computer though probably wouldn't hurt maybe then you can write the drivers yourself and I've already accepted that no matter how many drivers we do find this set up will never have Wi-Fi but as far as graphics drivers go there actually is kind of a solution if you've ever installed Windows XP and noticed it can usually run an 800 by 600 and higher even without graphics drives installed this driver uses that same technology to provide high resolutions to Windows 98 all the way up to 2560 by 1600 now it is still a generic graphics driver so there's little if any hardware acceleration but hey at least we could not be restricted to 640 by 480 and 16 colors and 2 colors yes come on you know we got to see what this looks like oh [Music] god that looks so good all right let's try leading in this new driver it comes with a bunch of different versions for different graphics chips and different amounts of video memory with the highest being 128 megabytes so much like the RAM situation it's likely that some of your video memory is gonna go to waste here but hey it's windows 98 so how graphically intensive is gonna be as expected it installs with no issue and before you know it we're restarting and yeah ok it's not high-res but it is full-color just for comparison this is what it looked like with only 16 colors and in control panel we can turn the res all the way up to the monitors native resolution which is indeed 1920 by 1080 hell yeah dude this is Windows 98 in full 1080p HD running on native modern hardware in fact it actually might even be a little too high-res it's only a 14 inch screen some of this text is kind of hard to read now there is actually a reason for this yes that is a 1080p screen but it really behaves more like a 1280 by 720 screen with about 50% more detail basically rather than making screens bigger with more pixels they're just cramming more of them into the same space and then the software scales up the text and scale of the images so it's just as readable and just as usable but there's more clarity and smoothness to the text a little more fine detail in the images Windows 10 supports this natively as does Mac OS with its Retina displays and also some window managers and Linux unfortunately none of those are Windows 98 but you could argue that if you had a CRT which was common back then that accepted really high resolutions as some of them did it's essentially the same principle cramming more pixels into the same area and who said CRTs were obsolete for its credit windows 98 does support increasing the size of its text but it's really not designed for this purpose all it does is literally just used a larger font size sometimes not particularly well and sometimes not at all this was more for people with impaired sight not for indulging in more pixels per inch in theory you could just set the resolution to 1280 by 720 so that it's at least usable but there isn't an option for it in the settings and I didn't feel like digging through the driver to try and add it if that is even possible but hey we got a graphics driver more or less let's see what else we can find unfortunately not to spoil things for you the answer turned out to be very little as I said before no Wi-Fi driver but there's also really no Ethernet driver making this a completely offline machine I did in fact find a dos driver for this computers Ethernet card which was kind of amazing all things considered but I don't know if you can use dos drivers and Windows then I'm too dumb to figure it out I tried installing the usual way and nothing happened then I tried installing through the network control panel and all that happened was I got a bonus error message on startup saying it couldn't find a driver I tried adding it to configure CS and it just caused it to hang on startup I mean all this assumes that I'm willing to tether myself to an Ethernet connection to use the Internet come on you think I am sound driver was equally fruitless the Realtek HD driver for the sound card only supports as low as Windows 2000 and I'm honestly surprised it goes that far back and I tried it anyway but it did nothing I then tried the real tech AC 97 driver that did support Windows 98 but it did not enable sound still nothing at all it without sound or Internet it's kind of a lame computer to use even for 1998 standards now I could fully go out and find replacement hard well it's a little more compatible with Windows 98 than what we've got at least but first of all it's a laptop so it'll be a little tough to swap parts out without them being external and the thing is there's no USB driver installed despite running off a USB flash drive it won't actually read anything else from a USB including like a peripheral and secondly if I start swapping out with older hardware it's not really a modern computer anymore is it this is also probably a good time to mention that it's actually really slow at times probably even slower than this computer now I'm sure a lot of this is just the fact that it's running from USB but in general it just seems sluggish and seems to struggle keeping up now granted maybe this is cuz of the generic graphics driver but I also wonder if it doesn't support the laptops various power saving methods so it's just like stuck at a low clock speed or something it also seems to consume battery a lot quicker in Windows 98 than Windows 10 but maybe that's just because I can't change the screen brightness and it defaults to 100% I don't know I'm not knowledgeable enough to really know the reasons behind these things and I guess I don't care enough to find out I guess I can always play around with desktop themes I used to love these things as a kid the screen savers even scale up to 1080p really well too bad I can't say the same for the 800 by 600 wallpapers I can also play solitaire I guess the things that entertained us back then or I can replace the startup screen by saving a 256 color bitmap as logo dot sis if only it was that simple today this is a particularly vapor wavy startup screen I made a couple months ago hi yes at the end of the day would I recommend doing this not really I mean outside of the coolness factor of being like oh wow I get the thing that's not you can really do with it a virtual machine is faster in every single way and never thought I'd be saying that just look at these comparisons [Music] not only that but with VMware at least you also get readily available drivers for everything you can even set arbitrary resolutions so that everything is readable on your high res screen and beautifully blocky pixels now I have a theory that there's kind of a sweet spot around 2004 or so where the drivers still supported Windows 98 but the hardware had gotten much better from when 98 was in its prime yeah up until around 2007 or so where you get diminishing returns dual cos became prevalent with 98 it has no support for lets driver support etc you know this probably a narrow window of time where you can grab hardware from that era and throw it all together get an adapter for an SSD get a proper graphics card you can probably build the ultimate windows 98 machine comment if you want to see me do that but yeah otherwise no much else to say it was a cool experiment but stick to a VM back in 2007 I actually had this exact same desktop wallpaper in my computer at school just for some kid to come up and say hey mat that wallpapers pretty gay memories hey guys thank you so much for watching I just wanted to mention this video was edited and all of a video editor I've been working on for the last few months it's free open-source multi-platform and aims to eventually be just as powerful as the high-end editors out there while still being totally free and easy to use it is currently an alpha so it might not yet be ready to replace your editor of choice but check it out development is very active so if you find a bug or have a feature request chances are it'll be fixed or implemented pretty quickly visit all of video editor org to download the latest version enjoy [Music] [Music] you

Channel: MattKC

Views: 2,189,136

Keywords: mattkc, kc, matt kc, kc x, windows 98, modern laptop, PC, i5, i7, i3, retro, vintage, 8 bit guy, technology, windows 95, windows 10, experiment, USB, windows from USB, microsoft, michaelsoft, binbows, thinkpad, t470, retrofuturism

Id: IO2BSLkQLDA

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Lord_Jello_III]

r/diWHY material right here.