Couldn't this be related to recent issues found in BIOS and waiting to be fixed by new AGESA and microcode update?

https://www.engadget.com/2019/07/12/ryzen-3000-systemd-bios/

I thought that its issue with RdRand instruction, which was introduced originally in Ivy Bridge CPUs, so Win98 shouldnt know about it.

Is it behaving the same in VirtualBox?

I had the same issue with my 98 VM on a Ryzen 7 2700. Never found a fix for it. My XP VM would also act funny.

in virtualbox, installation gives error with shell32.dll and explorer.exe, then it does nothing (image attached). after reset, it gives same error and does nothing again.

I found this thread with same error but no solution.
https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/ryzen … ows-98.3361871/

here I found some thread that might give hope, I have yet to test it.
https://communities.vmware.com/thread/579537

For VirtualBox, it seems, that disabling Nested Paging can help. You can try that, and then find similar option in VMware. Or install version 12 as suggested on theirs forum.
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=89230

Also, for VirtualBox there's another possible workaround:
https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f … tart=15#p392728

More detailed explanation about this issue:
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/

Oh, and there's already topic about this on Vogons:
Re: VME Broken on AMD Ryzen

Thanks for all the links.

Disabling nested paging in VBOX really made it work fine.

And after toggling "disable 32bit disk drivers in protected mode" in safe mode in vmware VM, it started working too.

I actually expected AMD would fix this issue in zen2. I might give it a few more tries in vmware playing with cpuid masks, but so far I was unsuccessful with that

Did you saw some performance degradation when disabling Nested Paging?

not really, but when you disable also vt-x / amd-v then it slows down a lot.

Yeah, that why I asked, if disabling Nested Paging without disabling also AMD-V drag the performance down. If you don't have to disable AMD-V as well, then I would say it's fine.

in VBox, after enabling scitech display driver, I booted into "Windows protection error"

Then I masked CPUID to Pentium III S with disabled VME bit and scitech driver installed fine. I also tried to install ie6 and Unofficial SP2.1. They give errors during install.
I tried to reinstall from scratch, it spans bunch of errors that can be ignored (attached) and install continues fine after that. enabling scitech driver rendered booting into black rectangle instead of screen 🙁

well, its still not ideal.

Is this the same behavior in both vmware player and virtualbox?

May want to bump this:
https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/17502

and post a thread here:
https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn … station/content

vmware 15 is not usable. Just when you disable those 32bit disk drivers it starts working somehow. Also in that case, network stops working too. But, I downgraded to vmware 12.5.9 as was advised in one of those vmware community threads linked in earlier posts, and it looks like it actually works as it used to with vt-x / amd-v mode 😀

marvias wrote on 2019-07-23, 23:38:

vmware 15 is not usable. Just when you disable those 32bit disk drivers it starts working somehow. Also in that case, network stops working too. But, I downgraded to vmware 12.5.9 as was advised in one of those vmware community threads linked in earlier posts, and it looks like it actually works as it used to with vt-x / amd-v mode 😀

I'm running into these same issues with my new 3900X system, but unfortunately I think that one of the most recent Windows 10 Creator updates prevented pre 15.x VMWare releases from working. I actually use Windows 98 VMs a lot, so it actually sucks that I can't make it work.

Encountering the same issue with Ryzen and Windows 98, I've tried everything from VMware 15 & 12.5.9, Virtualbox 5.2 & 6.1, with different setup options, e.g. ("APIC" on/off, "Intel VT-x, AMD-V/RVI" on/off, "nested pages" on/off, etc)
Neither worked, until....

I simply tried VMware 10.0.7 build-2844087 which did the trick even on Windows 10!
But make sure the options in "Processors" -> "virtualization engine" are all unticked (which is the default).
Find VMware 10.0 here

I'm curious if it works in your cases as well.

You may want to post that on the vmware forums. Alot of people weren't happy when they removed binary translation as of Vmware 14. So may be yet another reason to add it back.

Firstly, I'd like to hear if it's working for other people/systems as well before being too optimistic...

I'd imagine ryzen users wanting to use an ancient version of vmware to run 9x are pretty rare around here but you might get lucky. Might be better off creating a seperate thread for that or renaming this thread