I'm not giving up but in the interest of getting something out there, I've decided to end this video here. And when we meet again in part 2, hopefully we'll have something that actually works. Yup, we’re finally doing it. What’s it been a whole [censored] year? Jesus Christ. If you haven’t seen the first part, well... you should, but I’ll recap anyway. My goal was to build the fastest machine I could with parts that still officially supported Windows 98. Picking from a tiny window of time at the tail end of of hardware manufacturers supporting it. Yep, this is all about finding the fastest hardware we can. After all, this idea all came from trying to run 98 on a modern laptop, naturally finding all sorts of driver support issues, and wondering how new a fully supported 98 machine could be. So that's what we're here to find out. Fastest 98 PC possible, regardless of how much compatibility might be lost in the process. Anyways I’m sure you’re eager to see it in action, but first let me talk about what parts I’ve chosen and why this took so god damn long. First, let me talk about the motherboard. Last time, I’ll be honest, I didn’t put much thought into the motherboard. My criteria was chipset with Windows 98 drivers, AGP since I don’t know of any PCIe cards that support 98, and socket 775 since that’d be the newest socket that could still conceivably have those other features. Still, that’s a pretty rare combination. Socket 775 began in 2004, well into the era of Windows XP. But hey, tracking down rare parts were what this project was all about. But due to the rareness, I ended up kind of impulse buying the first one I found that met that criteria. Which looking back was probably a mistake. I think the motherboard I chose was, uh... kinda... crap? Especially when it came to its 98 support. This time I’ve been a little bit more choosey. Our criteria is still largely the same, as much as I wanted to ditch AGP. A lot of you guys expressed no surprised that a lot of my AGP cards were dead, saying that AGP cards are pretty notorious for dying, especially at this age. Unfortunately, when it comes to official support we don't really have many choices. Even if I could find a PCIe motherboard that supported Windows 98, the fastest card we can use is still AGP internally, even the PCIe version just uses an AGP to PCIe bridge chip on the card, so there's absolutely no benefit to using the PCIe version. So AGP stays and so does socket 775. Not only does that give us a wide range, since it was standard for a fairly long time, but since they'll all be from 2004 or later, the CPUs overall will be much faster than most 98 systems would have had back in the day. But there is a snag, which is that not every 775 motherboard is compatible with every 775 CPU. This list on VOGONS, which was a super valuable resource for this project, shows that a lot of 775 motherboards with AGP only support Pentium 4s and Celerons. Some people wondered why the last build had a Pentium 4 rather than a Core 2 of some kind, and well, this is why. That board I got was one of those Pentium 4-only boards. However, it turns out there are a handful of AGP boards that do support Core 2. I was talking about rare motherboards before, but these are even rarer. But for attempt number two, I knew I had to track one down in the name of making things ultimate. Way, way back in February, I’d finally decided on the parts and had it all planned out. Unfortunately where I live, rare computer parts tend to be even rarer than they are in other places. And while I waited about a month or so for the motherboard I had chosen to show up somewhere locally, I eventually bit the bullet and bought one from overseas around mid-March this year. Guess what else started to happen around mid-March this year! That's right! People started fighting over toilet paper. [screeching] So yeah, if not for... ...that, perhaps we’d be doing this video in April or May instead of now. It took so long, I even kept looking for local listings just to see if I could get one any sooner. But alas. It took 6 whole months but finally in September, the motherboard arrived straight from the Russian Federation. Say hello to the ASUS P5PE-VM. Socket 775, AGP, Windows 98 compatible chipset, and crucially Core 2 support. Some people said the last motherboard I chose was too new and I needed something older, but instead, I ended up going with something two years newer! Because I hate you all. It's definitely a unique motherboard. For 2006, it has a lot of features that would have seemed old even then, such as AC'97 audio, DDR1 RAM, an Intel 865G chipset from 2004, and of course AGP, as we've mentioned. I kind of feel like this motherboard was designed specifically to run old software. Either that or these components were really cheap to manufacture. But I think with this, we can pretty confidently say that this will be the fastest 98 PC that you can build. Speaking of which, let’s talk CPUs. Since we’re no longer restricted to Pentium 4s anymore, let’s go all out. This time I’ve chosen an Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 running at 3.33GHz. You may be thinking 3.33 sounds slower than the 3.8GHz Pentium 4 that we’re replacing. Particularly since Windows 98 won't be able to make much use of those two cores in the Core 2 Duo. But clock speed isn’t everything. Pentium 4s were notoriously inefficient, in fact, you could argue the only reason their clock speeds were so high is because they were so inefficient. A better way to compare is with benchmarks, a kind of real world performance test. And looking at single-threaded performance only, for our fairly single threaded Windows 98, the E8600 doesn't just benchmark faster than our old Pentium 4, it's in fact the fastest benchmarking single core performance of any socket 775 CPU in existence. Yeah. Any of them. As far as I'm concerned, this is the fastest CPU that can run Windows 98, period. Finally the GPU. I had initially considered fixing the dead 6800 Ultra I had last time, but I’m really no expert in component level repair. So instead, I'm starting off with one of these. Now this may seem like a weird and contradictory choice, indeed if you're familiar with this card, you know it's neither fast, nor particularly ultimate, but hear me out. Since I had so much trouble with AGP graphics cards last time, I felt like I didn't want to invest in another rare high end card until I knew everything else was functioning properly. Until then, while I was still experimenting and getting things set up, I wanted something cheap and fairly low risk. And the FX 5200 is about as dime-a-dozen as you can get for AGP. We'll see how well it does and replace it if necessary. Oh, and one last thing. By popular demand: dual channel RAM! I actually did intend to do this last time, I just didn’t have two matching sticks at the time and while I intended to get some, I ended up getting distracted by how broken everything was. Also I could only find two 512 sticks, so we will need to configure 98 to limit the memory since more than 512 is known to make 98 unstable. Besides that, everything else is the same. Same SSD, Blu-Ray drive, case, all that. So without further ado, let’s get to building! During this time I’ll address something a lot of people mentioned on my last video. The heatsink. I put it on backwards. I... have no excuse for this, I guess my caveman brain assumed fan meant air go this way but upon further inspection it definitely does not, so my bad. We’ll get 'em next time. And with the magic of editing, there we have it! The important question is: does it work? Well, does it? Nope. Which I kind of expected. I’ve already mentioned how my computer builds almost never work first try. You know, it’s kinda like programming. It's almost more suspicious if it does work the first time. I checked all the usual suspects, reseated the memory, the graphics card, and the 12v power rail. This board actually has integrated graphics so I tried that too, but nothing was getting it to boot. God, wouldn't it suck if I spent this long waiting for this long waiting for this specific motherboard and it just turned out to be dead. But as I was looking things up about this motherboard, I spotted something. Something I probably should have seen a long time ago. A list of compatible CPUs for this motherboard. And guess what, the E8600 was nowhere on it. Well I'm glad I got this death cable in the last video, I may have some use for it after all. I felt like there was still maybe a chance though. The latest BIOS update says it "Supports new CPUs" with a link to a page that doesn’t exist anymore. So maybe this board just has an old BIOS and the website is badly maintained? Okay I know it’s a stretch, but come on let me have this. I have nothing else to look forward to in 2020. But to update the BIOS we’ll need to, you know, actually have it turn on. So we’ll need to use a different CPU for the time being. Unfortunately, I already sold the Pentium 4 from the last video, so I had to salvage another Pentium 4 from this other PC. It’s okay, it was a junk system anyway. Changing the CPU was easier said than done. The heatsink is screwed down with these tool-less nuts but it’s almost impossible to realistically fit your hand in this gap here. You can use a flathead screwdriver, which does make it a lot easier, but even then it still finds ways to fall off and bounce into some other hard to reach area of the case. The only nut I’m feeling is one directly into my eye. Anyway, eventually I got the new CPU in and booted it up. The BIOS immediately appeared and POST beeped so I guess that confirms the CPU is the culprit. Honestly, at this point, I’m just glad the motherboard isn’t broken. The BIOS claimed to be version 2.53 and the latest is... ...1501? Well that doesn’t mean anything to me. Okay, the startup screen says revision 0702 which strikes me as a lot smaller than 1501, so let’s give updating a shot. This BIOS, being you know old, unfortunately predates built-in flashing so we’ll have to find some OS to boot into. Or at least that’s what I thought before I realized 98 was still installed on this SSD from last time! Booting into this was a trip! The first thing I noticed was that it was very fast, which is interesting because I remember noting that the last build was slower than I expected. Of course, it then entered a flurry of new device found messages because the hardware was literally all new, but the funniest part was the mouse was going absolutely ape [censored]. The keyboard still works so I can still control it, but the mouse is just doing whatever it wants and having a good time I plugged in another mouse and it worked fine, so I guess that mouse just coincidentally broke. Anyways I skipped past the new devices but then it kind of froze? And blue screened? Lovely. I can’t really complain though. This is a year old install from a whole other computer that was already having driver issues before. I booted into safe mode because I figured as long as I could get DOS running, I could flash the BIOS, but of course the problem there was that then no flash drive drivers would load and I didn’t have a floppy drive and the Blu-Ray drive wasn’t being picked up either. So... how exactly are we gonna get the BIOS update on there? It was at this point that I realized the BIOS supported USB booting. I’d kind of assumed it’d be too old for that, but cool! So I just ended up making a FreeDOS boot disk and flashing that way. Actually a lot easier than whatever [censored] I was trying before. Alright, BIOS is up to date! Which means I get to go through the fun of swapping out CPUs again! So did our firmware update work? [sigh] No. It doesn’t. So the list from earlier must have been correct all along. The perfect motherboard just doesn’t support the perfect CPU. I should have expected this though. The BIOS update happens to predate the release of the E8600 by literally a few months. It was that close. I don't know why I never came across this list or thought to look it up before. I guess I take for granted how easy buying new hardware is, where, since it's all naturally from the same generation, you can generally expect a lot of it to be compatible. Of course, this PC has been cherry-picked from various points in history so that doesn't apply here. Either way, I had a decision to make. Keep the board and get an older CPU or go through the process of finding yet another motherboard that might actually support this chip. Despite everything, I did look at what my options were as far as replacement motherboards. I looked at pretty much every motherboard left that still fit the criteria, and you know what? None of them supported the E8600. It was just too new for this class of motherboard. With that in mind, I stuck with this one and decided to downgrade CPUs. Luckily Core 2 Duos are not rare so I could actually make a local purchase for once in my god damn life. This is the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. Is it the fastest 775? No. Is it the fastest Core 2 Duo? No. Is it even the fastest CPU that this motherboard can handle? No, that goes to the much, much rarer Core 2 Extreme X6800. But it’s not far behind, and I just don’t have the patience to spend a fortune and wait another 6 months for a rare CPU to arrive from Uzbekistan or wherever. So this is the combo I’ve settled on, and given the limitations I’m happy with what we’ve got. It was time to install Windows 98, and I wanted a completely clean install, so I decided to wipe the disk. Since Windows 98’s partitioning tools are a little primitive, I decided to try partitioning in Linux first using a live disk and GParted. Then I tried to load the setup, but I realized MS-DOS wasn't picking up the Blu-Ray drive, much like 98 wasn't earlier. Interestingly, it detects the SSD though, is it just because it’s Blu-Ray? Ah well, since it does pick up the SSD, I’ll just install off the SSD itself. So I booted back into Linux and copied all the installer files from the CD to the SSD. Yes, Windows 98 will allow you to install from and to the same disk. This will probably make the whole thing a lot faster too since everything will be SSDs. I’ll still be using the 98 CD to boot into MS-DOS, but after that, all the setup files will be running off the SSD itself. Huh... I guess ScanDisk doesn't like GParted's partition job. Luckily, we can skip ScanDisk for the setup, but this might be a bad sign for the rest of the install. I guess we'll find out. Setup booted from the SSD without a hitch and away we go! Now I won't make you watch this, I’m sure you’re all familiar with the Windows 98 installer, but I will say that this was super fast. In fact, the total install time from start to finish was only roughly about five minutes. Considering the rarity of SSDs at the time, this might be one of the fastest 98 installs ever on fully compatible hardware. Definitely a lot faster than last time. But then there was a problem. Windows wouldn’t actually boot. It’d get really close, but then stop and eventually restart itself. Hooh boy. It really locks up too. No response to anything, not even Ctrl+Alt+Del. Well I went ahead and tried safe mode and it actually worked! Strange it’s having driver problems already. Besides the install files on the disk, this thing is entirely vanilla. How could a driver that shipped with it already be causing problems? Well I told it to make a log, but there was nothing helpful there. I also tried the onboard graphics but that did nothing either. Then I tried disabling other components in the BIOS and changed some other settings but nothing really made any difference. I wondered if I’d screwed things up by making the partition table in Linux. ScanDisk clearly wasn't happy and I wouldn't be surprised if all this stuff was pretty temperamental. So I remade it with 98’s official partition tools, copied the files over, and installed again. While this was slow any annoying, ScanDisk did seem a lot happier this time. And while I struggled to see how this could really cause that hanging issue, the fact is it's not like reinstalling took a particularly long time. But it didn’t help. It was still frozen. Worth a shot, I guess. I tried "step by step confirmation" boot, which I’ve never found useful in the past, but then again I’ve never had 98 fail so soon before, even on that 2017 laptop. And it wasn’t particularly useful. It allowed me to disable four Windows drivers, none of which did anything. I wondered if there was an issue with the Blu-Ray drive, for no other reason than that we know DOS didn’t support it and it’s one of the few components we have left to troubleshoot. I tried booting with it unplugged and then got this. It’s a blue screen, but one like I’ve never seen before. "Your Multi-function device 'Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller' has some... [devolves into mumbling] [continues mumbling] "...corruption." [more mumbling] [even more mumbling] "Press any key to continue." Sooooo yeah... Pressing any key actually did nothing, but the advice was pretty clear. Time to reboot. And... it worked! So holy [censored], the moral of the story is when in doubt, unplug your Blu-Ray drive. Checking Device Manager, the primary and secondary IDE controllers have exclamation marks on them, but that's fine, we’re not actually using those anyway. The dual IDE controllers that it mentioned in that message seem fine? Well alright, let us go forth and install Mass Storage Device drivers so we can actually use flash drives on this thing. I have a CD prepared that I have handy for any 98 install on real hardware. Oh... wait, I just unplugged the Blu-Ray drive. Huh. Tricky. Maybe whatever that message did fixed something that would make the drive work now? Well it's not crashing with it plugged in anymore, but yeah it still isn't working. The only other drive is this, which I think is the BIOS spoofing in the flash drive, but it didn't seem to open. I did try swapping in a different drive, just a DVD-RW which 98 should support, but still nothing. I think it really wants an IDE drive instead. Unfortunately I’ve just realized that while I have some IDE drives, I don’t actually have any IDE cables. Great. So how do we get files to it? Well the same way we did last time! Boot into Linux and inject the files directly. Now booting back into 98, and I gotta say, the boot up is really quick. It’s literally blink and you’ll miss it. I guess this might change when the drivers are installed, but right now the speed is really nice. The driver installed super quickly and before long, we had flash drive support. It was time to install the rest of the drivers! Unlike last time, I was actually able to install the sound driver! Like holy [censored], that was like the one thing I got hung up on last time. In fact, not only was I able to install the sound driver, the sound actually worked! Like, I just got so used to the last build that I'm honestly kind of stunned! Well, we can’t forget about the grand finale: the graphics driver. I don’t like to play favorites, but this one is always the most exciting because it results in the starkest change. On the topic of drivers and hardware, I do wanna mention something that often happens when I make videos on Windows 98. There's always a handful of comments telling me that 98 hardware support sucks and I really should be using 98 Second Edition instead. Well, fun fact! I always use Second Edition! It's the one I grew up with and I guess I've never felt the need to use anything else. Honestly I kind of forget that there is a First Edition, which is why I've never mentioned it before. But here's me officially mentioning it. It's Second Edition. Always has been. Anyways, graphics driver's done, and... WHOA! Millions of colors?! High resolutions?! Whoa nice graphics, I'd like to get my hands on that game! And in almost no time, all of our unknown devices have been resolved! In fact, the chipset driver seems to have replaced our dual IDE controllers with actual names, and I wonder if that addressed whatever that blue screen message was talking about earlier. Also our other IDE controllers have been upgraded to dual fifo, which I don't know, sounds like a good thing. So... holy [censored], I’m actually going to call that fully set up! Still no DVD drive, guess I'll have to wait til I can get some IDE cables. But for now, what I’m gonna do is go ahead and make an image of this install so that if anything goes wrong later, I’ll have a point to restore to. I’m using Clonezilla and the backup took a very short time since this basic Windows 98 install is only about 500MB in size. Isn’t that crazy? Now it’s finally time to get some games installed, and I'll max out that resolution. There we go, look at that [censored]. I even set up ethernet driver. Not because I expect much browsing to be done on these geriatric browsers, but, you know, maybe we can play an online game or two on here. I wanna push this build as far as I can so I’m gonna install KernelEx, which basically implements some functions from 2000 and XP into 9x to increase compatibility. KernelEx asked me to download something, so look at that! LAN driver is already paying off! You may expect me to install some antivirus, but as we all know... There are no viruses for Windows 98, dude! You just can't install a virus on it! You just can't do it! KernelEx allows me to install Firefox 3, which is slightly newer than the official newest Firefox for Windows 98. But its SSL support is still too outdated to browse most websites. But not too outdated to access the Vaporwave 98 page I made two years ago. In fact, I specifically set this up so that any Windows 98 browser could access it, and indeed we can. Ahh, wonderful. Alright, let's get to the games. Since we’re still missing a CD drive, I installed Daemon Tools so I can mount ISOs, which required a number of other updates... Whatever, we’re skipping past that. Now most of my ISOs are on an external NTFS hard drive and 98 never actually supported NTFS. There is a sysinternals package that injects files from Windows NT or 2000 so that NTFS drives can appear. And it... actually worked! Both reading and writing. But, uhh... Do we really want this? A notoriously unstable OS with an unofficial NTFS driver having full write access to a hard drive with valuable things on it? So here's another hard drive I'll be using. I went to the liberty of formatting it as FAT32 and copying a bunch of ISOs over to it. Now let’s start off with an extremely graphically intense game. Something that only the best of the best can run. Pushing our system to the absolute limit. Brace yourselves. Well, you know, it’s technically true that not every computer can run this, because it’s 16-bit, so, you know, most modern computers won’t. Funnily enough, even though I know this game is famous, I never really played it growing up. I was always more of a Pinball kid. Speaking of which... Okay, okay, I know. While these are very much iconic games of the era, they aren’t pushing limits of any kind. Let’s stretch out to some real games of the era. Long time viewers know I wouldn't be being true to myself if I didn’t start with this boy: That’s right, the one and only. As someone who’s... familiar with its performance requirements, I was very interested to see how it would perform on our system. Would it already be powerful enough to significantly affect the turning controls? Unfortunately I ran into a problem. With LEGO Island set to hardware mode, it just crashed, and then hardware mode disappeared from the list entirely. Well, I can always play in software mode, and can confidently say that our Core 2 Duo CPU is more than capable of running the game on its own. And it is already fast enough to impede the turn speed. In fact, this might be even worse than newer hardware because the frame rate keeps fluctuating up and down, meaning the turn controls are all over the place. I mean, at least on today’s computers, it’s consistently horrible. Presumably, it'd be even faster in hardware mode, but that just doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Maybe I'll come back to it later. Moving forward, DUDE, SO... ARE YOU READY... FOR HALO one. This port was released in 2003, but the game is from 2001 so either way, I feel like this hardware should be able to run it. Occasionally I still load this game up to play the surprisingly active online multiplayer, which makes it kind of surreal to see this installer on Windows 98. But I ran into another problem here too, it said it couldn't initialize DirectDraw. Huh, two DirectX issues in a row? Something’s definitely wrong here. Even weirder, in the diagnostic tool DXDIAG, I could test DirectDraw just fine, but testing Direct3D did a similar immediate close and then suddenly there was no acceleration available. This was shaping up to be a real puzzle, but then stopped being a puzzle as soon as I updated DirectX. And then DXDIAG worked fine. Well now I wanna see how LEGO Island looks in hardware mode. Pfft phbhbt htffffftt huhuehuehu Well then. I did not expect that. Actually I'm kind of surprised. I know LEGO Island has compatibility issues today, but it already has issues on this hardware? Any attempt to move to the island crashes the game sooooo yeah. I don’t think this’ll work. Well, back to Halo then. It actually seems to work pretty much perfectly. I was really curious about joining an online match. I thought it’d be hilarious if this old ass setup could keep up with everyone else. Yeah, it works! And we’re getting a very... reasonable... what is that, 20 FPS? I mean hey, it works! I’m playing Halo with some Hay-bros on Windows 98! But... okay. We knew this was coming. We knew this graphics card wasn't the most powerful thing in the world and it looks like we're seeing the result of that. It was at this point I looked up specifically how much power the FX 5200 had, or more specifically didn’t have. The card I went for last time was the 6800 Ultra, the last NVIDIA card to officially support Windows 98. On videocardbenchmark.net, the 6800 Ultra scores 139. Not much by today’s standards, but for the time, it was pretty good. But this? The FX 5200? It’s... Well... I don’t even know how to make this funny. It’s 8. It’s [censored] 8. It has like 5% of the performance of the 6800 Ultra. I know I’d mostly gone for the FX 5200 because it was convenient and cheap, but seeing all these graphical problems has kind of changed my mind. Anyways, I knew what I had to do, and for a change, I had luck on my side. A rare AGP 6800 showed up in my country. I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t cheap, but I knew it was the last piece of the puzzle as far as making this computer as powerful as it could be. It arrived... I installed it... it booted up, and... Halo still runs like [censored]! In fact it looks exactly the same, which means I guess it can’t be a GPU bottleneck because if it was, we should have at least seen some difference after installing a card that’s over 17x faster. And CPU bottleneck doesn’t really make sense because it's a dual core from 2006 and should easily be able to manage. Look at this clip of me playing the campaign, it’s just absolutely unplayable. Something else was going on here, something a lot more nuanced. I discovered that changing the texture quality to low improved performance a lot, right up until it didn’t. Check out how the ammunition graphic just dies and then the whole computer follows suit. I think this a graphics driver issue, which would kind of make sense. I had heard that for the last NVIDIA card to support 98, it doesn't support it very well. Even this graphic in the driver settings seems to assume you're running XP somehow. Well our first two games certainly haven’t been very promising, but luckily things started to look up after this. This next game’s a bit of a cult classic. This is Trespasser released in 1998. It serves as a direct sequel to the second Jurassic Park movie, The Lost World, but it’s actually far more ambitious than your average movie tie-in. I wouldn’t call it "good", in fact, GameSpot called it "the worst game of 1998", but it’s not because they didn’t try, in fact quite the opposite. Like I said, it was extremely ambitious. This game actually introduced a lot of concepts that today are pretty commonplace, including ragdoll physics, physics engines in general, immersive 3D open worlds, and AI controlled enemies. While again, the game isn’t "good", what it was trying to do was pretty incredible, and it was known for running poorly on the hardware common at the time of its release. And yeah, it really does. On here, the game actually works really well, as well as it can at least. It performs great both on software and hardware mode. Yeah one of Trespasser’s quirks is that since development happened largely before widespread 3D acceleration, its software mode can be both faster and in some ways better looking than its hardware mode. But this system handles both at what looks like a pretty solid 60 FPS. You play as Anne, who isn’t from the movie, but does have this cool noodle arm. You know, I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to be a woman, and now I finally know. You can see what they were going for. Kind of a first person survival horror attempting, but ultimately not achieving, an extremely realistic environment. And as such, this game has developed a cult following that develops mods for the game to fix bugs, add new levels, and even write fanfiction. It’s really quite incredible, all these people rallying around what the game could have been. Well I may be dead, but at least my boobs are still firm and full. Anyone remember Rollercoaster Tycoon? Sure this isn’t a graphically intense game by any means, but for me, no 98 PC is complete without it. I used to play this for hours as a kid, and in fact some of the earliest videos I ever uploaded on this channel were me playing Rollercoaster Tycoon; see if you can find them. Unfortunately, you can’t run OpenRCT2, which is the new open source implementation, since it depends on SDL 2 which only supports as low as XP. But hey, maybe someone will port it to SDL 1 some day. Ahh, now our next game is a real good one. It’s so good I made a whole video all about how much I... like it. Sonic Heroes on the PC. Now I know the only decent port of this is on Gamecube, but hey, what if I didn’t have a Gamecube? Or a Wii. Or Dolphin-- just pretend that it’s 2004 and I’m too broke to buy a Gamecube or Windows XP. But somehow have a high end graphics card... This game actually runs really well. Like this is pretty much perfect. It looks great and the frame rate is super smooth. I’m pretty happy with this and it adds more weight to the theory that Halo isn’t necessarily bottlenecked by GPU power. I mean yes, Halo is probably a little more graphically intense, but the performance difference is just night and day. No I still don’t like the game, but I like how well it’s running! This is Half-Life, probably one of my favorite FPSes of the era. While the textures and models look a little dated now, the feeling of terror is still just as palpable. This system runs it really well too. I’ve maxed out the game at 1280x960, though technically this monitor is 1280x1024, Unfortunately, the game doesn’t go that high without patches. But yeah, other than that, it looks and plays pretty much perfectly. I’m not sure if it’s hitting a consistent 60 FPS, it feels like it might be closer to 40 something, but still perfectly playable. This is Driver, 100% one of my favorite games for the PS1, and I've always wanted to see how different it is on PC but never got around to making it work on Windows 10. The menus look pretty much the same, but when I try to get in game, it just freezes. Is this like Halo? Another potential driver--no pun intended--issue? How about GTA Vice City? This was another game I loved playing as a kid and I just loved causing absolute chaos. Back then, I played on the original Xbox and never thought to run it on Windows 98. And you know what? This game runs perfectly too. I don't see any problems or any issues with performance. By default it’s locked to 30 FPS, and you can disable the frame limiter and run the game at smoother frame rates, but apparently that leads to bugs and glitchy physics. It doesn’t matter because the game runs smoothly on this either way. And hey, as long as I can drive around town inexplicably in a panzer tank, I’m good! By the way, I wanna mention some of these games were suggested by Patrons - yes I made one! To help support the various costs of making videos and, you know, being alive. One of the perks I offer, apart from early access and bonus content, is the ability to vote in polls that I’ll be putting up routinely to help me make decisions. So if you’d like to help me both monetarily and with decision making, check out the Patreon link in the description down below. Okay, so we've played a lot of early 2000s games, you may be thinking, on a DOS-based OS, we should play some DOS games. Now they're a little before my time so I didn't prioritize them that much, but I thought I may as well try some of the more famous ones. Predictably, I had some trouble with DOS games on this system. A lot of lockups and freezes, however they pretty much all seem to be sound card related, which in a way makes sense, because it's not a DOS-compatible card by any means, but on the other hand, 98 Second Edition is supposed to emulate a Sound Blaster itself, which you can see in this list of environment variables here. In fact, one time, I did manage to get sound to play... But then, the app locked up right after, and never opened again. So I might chalk this up to driver issues again? Unless 98's Sound Blaster emulator isn't very good. Like I said, DOS gaming really isn't my forte. But hey, without sound, every game I tried worked great. So I guess if you wanna do this and play DOS games too, make sure you get a DOS-compatible sound card. So we’ve shown a pretty wide variety of games that mostly seem to work. Unfortunately we do have a pretty hard cutoff around 2005-2006ish where games just stopped supporting anything older than XP, which naturally cuts out a lot of great games that are more recent. And I'm sure you could easily that any more modern games than that would be missing the point of a PC that runs 98, but for science I do have some curiosity about running ridiculously new games. In that vein, I want to showcase a video by SalC1 who, with his friend Cortex, got the latest version of Minecraft to run on a Windows 98 virtual machine using a number of patches and workarounds. While it was tempting to try this myself, patching new games to run on 98 is probably a little out of scope for this particular video I mean this video's already taken long enough... But perhaps I’ll give it a try some time in a later video. Okay before we finish up, there is one thing I’d like to do, and some of you may find it a little sacrilegious. On a separate SSD... I installed Windows XP. I wanted to try the games that failed before like Halo and Driver. Since I was fairly sure it had to be a software or driver issue with those games, my theory was with XP, the drivers for this graphics card would probably be much newer and better supported than the ones released for 98. Particularly considering the drivers for XP were updated as recently as 2013, while the drivers for 98 stopped in 2005. And guess what? Halo runs pretty much flawlessly. There are bits and pieces of slow down here and there in the bigger firefights but honestly about what I’d expect for hardware of this age. Even Driver works perfectly, which I really didn’t expect. Uh, LEGO Island still doesn't work but, you know, what can you do. And if I’m being 100% honest here, I have to admit that this hardware seems a lot more comfortable running XP than 98. The hardware really is just too new and the drivers are clearly... ...underdeveloped. I cut a lot of this out, but while the system started out fairly speedy and usable, the more drivers and software I installed, the slower and more unstable it got. About half of the time I booted into it, it would just lock up immediately, which meant I often had to sit there rebooting until I got a session that would actually let me use it. Also, the moment I installed USB 2.0 drivers, it stopped shutting down properly forever. Every single time, it would just hang on this screen requiring me to manually reboot or power it off myself. I tried so many hotfixes, patches, and workarounds, but I never got this to stop happening. Which was especially annoying since 98 asks you to reboot a lot. Out of habit, I'd click yes and go off to do something else, expecting it to finish by the time I got back, just to inevitably find it stuck on this screen waiting for me to hard reboot it. Between this lockup, the intermittent lockups on boot, constant fatal blue screens or other system crashes, this was a very frustrating computer to use. In fact, outside of this experiment, I'd be inclined to call it pretty much unusable. I know the DOS-based versions of Windows had a reputation for instability, but I really don’t remember it being quite this bad. Maybe it's rose-tinted glasses, but I'm confident this hardware isn't helping at all. At first I thought it was funny, and maybe slightly irritating, that a lot of Windows 98 support threads from the early 2000s simply ended with someone saying: "Bro just get XP, it's actually really good." Now that I've experienced the difference again first hand, it's starting to make a lot of sense why that is. 98 just kinda sucks. Which is not how I expected a video about the ultimate 98 PC to end... The real moral of the story is: there is no ultimate PC. Much like us humans, no computer is perfect, so the question is whether that computer is perfect for you and what you wanna use it for. So pick a few games or things you wanna do and build your retro PC around that. Don't just set out to find the fastest parts you can, I mean, pfft, what are you, some kind of idiot? Not me!
Watched this the other day, it was fascinating!
that channel is gold
Just found his channel last week.. very fun guy!