Aideka wrote:

Xenphor wrote:

Alright I decided to go with the Yamaha XG YMF744. Apparently it has XG midi support in windows which would be nice even if there is a soft synth. I also don't care about EAX and mostly just care about stability and compatibility.

One other question I was wondering about is power consumption since I only have a spare Antec BP 350W power supply. Will that be enough to power the system? In the video it said the system didn't consume that much power (about 80-85W) but I've been looking at other windows 98 builds and apparently some of them can consume quite a bit of power.

The power consumption and the need for hugely powerful PSUs is something I consider more of a myth than reality. I powered my Athlon 64 3800+, Radeon X800 Pro, 3Gb DDR, 3 HDD system with a 350W Nexus power supply for about 10 years before the caps on the PSU gave up. My current i5 3450 (overclocked), GTX 960 (overclocked) 4 HDDs and 16Gb DDR3 consume around 250w at max synthetic load, and are powered by a 12 year old Antec Truepower Trio 430w PSU.

I see. I know that's true of newer systems but don't really know anything about older stuff and how power consumption works. One video I watched said that the 5v rail somehow needs to be more robust for older CPUs.

Xenphor wrote:

... One video I watched said that the 5v rail somehow needs to be more robust for older CPUs.

What they meant is older motherboards' VRM designs convert power from the 5v rail to feed the CPU. Newer machines, including your Athlon 64, pull from the 12v rail instead, and your BP350 should be more than enough. If your build was based on the Athlon XP (or older) instead, we would be telling you to get a different PSU with beefier 5v rail.

What was said above. The need for 5v heavy PSUs really mostly comes from Athlon XP systems. Pentium 3 CPUs (and earlier) draw the power for the CPU from 5v also, but they use so little power in comparison to Athlon XP systems, that they aren't a huge problem. My Pentium 3 500MHz Compaq Deskpro system is powered by a 120w PSU and it is doing just fine. For Athlon 64 you could most likely get any modern supply and it would work just fine, as long as the GPU isn't pulling excessive amounts of power from the 5v rail, and most of them don't.

I see thanks. Well the motherboard arrived already so just waiting on the other parts.

I just realized that one of the differences in the A8V-X board is that it doesn't have overclocking features, which means I can't adjust the multiplier to downclock the CPU like he did in the video. I'm assuming this was mainly for DOS compatibility or will windows 98 games not run correctly as well?

Ok I got the MB, cpu, ram and video card in so I just tested to see if it would boot with the windows 98 easyboot usb and it seems to be working properly.

But dear god I was not expecting the cacophony when I first turned it on; it sounds like a wind tunnel. I don't have it in a case right now so maybe I could at least replace the CPU fan with a decent 120mm Noctua one but I'm not sure if just laying it on top of the heatsink is the best idea. Would it be less effective because of the lower RPM and less concentrated airflow over the heatsink?

edit:
got the SSD but not the IDE adapters so I tried just using the onboard sata to see if it would work. I already partitioned and formatted the drive in Linux and the installer seems to see the drive because I made the setup directory on it to copy the install files over. It copied about one file and then basically stalled so I guess it's not going to work. It also seemed to stall when I tried formatting it with the win98 installer instead of Linux.

The drive appears under the 3rd IDE master. I tried swapping it to the other set of sata ports but then it wasn't detected.

What was really strange was that a Linux install I made to a usb drive using the win98 system was not able to detect the sata drive. Dmesg reported some error and lsblk would not list the drive. I tried both AHCI mode and SATA mode. I mean, surely a modern linux distro still has sata2 support? So since Windows 10 would only format the drive as NTFS or exfat, I actually had to boot another linux install on my windows 10 machine and use that to format the drive.

update:
I've gotten it up and running now. I didn't know that you can only boot windows 98 on either the 1st or 2nd IDE channels and my motherboard doesn't seem to have an option to reassign the 3rd or 4th ones. I just went ahead and ditched the sata ports completely and got a sata to pata converter which seems to be working well so far. Compared to videos I've seen online with people using mechanical drives there's still a pretty huge boost in performance when using a SSD even though I guess it's severely bottle necked. I did have to use Linux to partition and format the drive otherwise scandisk came up with errors about LBA or something when I ran windows 98 setup.

Drivers from VIA failed to install but loaded upon reboot. There doesn't seem to be a 98 driver for my onboard ethernet, although I tried one which didn't work that was for a SiS chipset that used the same realtek model.

My magic-ns adapter works which is really nice because that means all modern controllers will work wirelessly.

Issues I've had so far:
Unreal gold runs like garbage for some reason. Enabling 32bit color slows everything to a crawl. I guess because it's a glide optimized game because when I used dgvoodoo it ran much better, about how it does on my modern machine. Without it there doesn't seem to be a way to vsync the game at all and the FPS fluctuates wildly.

Speaking of vsync, I tried adding the coolbits registry additions that's supposed to open up more options in the control panel but they don't show up for some reason. Using regedit I can see the new entries listed there but not in the control panel. Having more vsync options would be nice because using the default vsync profile setting for Unreal did nothing at all. Neither did enabling it in the game itself.

Need for speed 1 se had some crackling audio. I'm using the wdm driver for the Yamaha ymf 744 card because I need daemon tools working with cd audio so perhaps that's the cause? Also the fmvs have artifacts.

Super Bubsy completely crashes the system every time.

Mortal Kombat Trilogy's video mode detecting utility fails and I can't play the game. Using the dos version works but the colors are all messed up.

Bug!'s fmv videos are messed up but gameplay seemed okay. Crashed one time.

Last Bronx runs too fast.

NFS3 and High Stakes have inexplicable suttering/slow downs but that also happens on my modern pc with fan patches. I think they run at some odd refresh rate.

Daytona USA CE runs pretty well.

TL DR
So all in all I guess I had pretty much an authentic win 98 experience even after trying very hard not to have one.