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Win98 on big memory systems

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

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Has anyone yet figured out a way to get Win98SE to run on a system with more than 1GB of RAM and AGP? I'm aware of the [vcache] fiddling, but that doesn't help AGP.

In all the intervening years, has anyone figured out an answer?
 
I wasn't even aware of that particular problem. Can't ya' just yank a stick of ram? :) But, seriously, I remember, way back when, I used to have a program that would remove a specified amount of ram from the pool so one could see how things would run under specifc memory limitations. Now, this was probably a DOS program but I'd bet there's a way to convince WIN98 that a system doesn't have as much memory as it actually does. I'm sure there are a few old Viruses and Trojans out there that did just that when they were king! :) Maybe a benign rootkit would do the trick? After all, and contrary to what MicroSloth would like you to believe, the older Windows versions still ran on top of DOS.
 
I've looked pretty hard. I think that Win98 uses the first 64M of memory for normal operation and the rest for Vcache. You can cut the size of Vcache and limit the high physical address used (MaxPhysicalBlocks), but Win98 won't recognize the AGP card because the AGP aperture (I've tried running it down to 16M with no soap) doesn't lie within Win98's addressing capabilities and the system defaults to 640x480 VGA.

If this weren't a multi-boot system, I might just yank a stick or two. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
 
Well... There's a guy who has supposedly found a way around the limitation, but I'm rather skeptical. Considering the bold claims and complete lack of technical details, and the fact that he's selling the patch (even though most other Windows hackers release their unofficial patches for free), it kinda sets off my BS alarm. But, I've also seen a fair number of reports that it works. So it might be an avenue worth investigating, at least...
 
i didn't even know 98 had a problem with AGP cards. really? i could have sworn i've seen AGP driver downloads for cards for it. was it just the original edition that had this issue? now that i think about it, i KNOW (unless i'm nuts, which is likely) i've ran a 98SE box with the proper drivers for it's AGP card... but it's only if you have more than 1 GB of RAM, eh? i think the machine in question had exactly 1 GB so nevermind i suppose.
 
Yep, if I pull DIMMs until I have less than 1GB, the AGP's fine (right now I have an ASUS TNT+ Vanta installed, but I have a pile of others, including a Voodoo 3D).

Yeah, it's screwy that you can actually have too much RAM.
 
I found out the hard way setting up a freinds CAD systems (he purchased the parts) back in 1999 or 2000. Win98 with anything over 500MB (or 750MB RAM) will not run, he had 1GB and a Geforce 2 or 3 AGP card.

These days I would run Win2k on any such system anyway, or just yank out the extra RAM (or use an intel 815e chipset that can't do more then 512MB anyway).
 
Thought I'd cap this one off. I'm using a Supermicro P6DGE dual P3 using the i440GX chipset and 1.5GB installed memory. System performance seems to suffer if 2GB is installed; I suspect this is because the addressing limit of the chipset is maxed out and the BIOS makes some unfortunate choices as a result. AAR, not a Win98SE issue and 1.5GB is fine.

My final solution for Win98SE involved several steps.

The first was to edit SYSTEM.INI and change the MaxPhysPage and MaxFileCache values.

Then, apply the Unofficial Win98SE SP2.

Next, since a potload of memory was going to go unused, I installed the HIMEMX.EXE XMS driver and the XMSDSK.EXE RAMDisk driver. Note that if you're going to use Windows 98SE, you need to include the /t (load at top of XMS area) switch, otherwise Windows gets confused.

The last hurdle for me was using an ASUS TNT+ VANTA AGP card. Windows refused to accept that it was there, insisting on using the generic 16-color 640x480 VGA driver instead. That was fixed by going to desktop-properties->settings->advanced->adapter and telling Windows to use the AGP drivers that already had been loaded. You get a warning message, which it's safe to ignore.

The RAMDisk is being used for browser cache and system temp files. I don't think it's a good idea to try to use if for swap file, as XMSDSK is a real-mode driver and switching modes might not result in the performance improvement that might be expected.

I'm up and running. Operation seems to be pretty smooth.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Thought I'd cap this one off. I'm using a Supermicro P6DGE dual P3 using the i440GX chipset and 1.5GB installed memory. System performance seems to suffer if 2GB is installed; I suspect this is because the addressing limit of the chipset is maxed out and the BIOS makes some unfortunate choices as a result. AAR, not a Win98SE issue and 1.5GB is fine.
Click to expand...

I assume that Win98se is not the primary OS for this system? No idea why you would use a dual processor and all that RAM unless you were running Win2k/XP or some form of NT or UNIX as well.
 
No, I'm running 3 OSes on this system. As a matter of fact, the Win98SE partition boots to non-GUI DOS, but I don't count that as a separate OS. The important thing with Win 9x is being able run old VxDs, access I/O ports directly and not have any elaborate virtualization in the way.
 
Glad you found the fix. That's odd that the RAM + AGP cause an issue, obviously I never had more than 1GB on my 98se box but I definitely had AGP on my custom system at the time running fine with it. I think you already know this but despite the RAM workaround 98 won't use more than 768MB of RAM IIRC even though it will recognize it being there after the modification.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Out of curiousity Chuck, what other OSs are you running on it?
Click to expand...

Win2K and Debian right now, although that may change--I've thought about replacing Debian with NetBSD, which tends to support older hardware. I suppose that I could run XP instead of 2K, but that's less important.

The big reason I picked this motherboard up was (a) it was a quality product, made in the US and pretty cheap (b) I already had a matched set of SECC2 1 GHz P3s in my hellbox (c) It fully supports the 2 ISA slots on the board, including DMA.
 
I saw that earlier, but it turns out that it's a bit incomplete. MaxPhysPage and MaxFileCache mods won't do the job completely. Apparently, there are some gotchas in VMM32 that bollix up addressing.

The MSFN forum points up people who are running 98SE with 16GB and 8GB of memory, quite successfully. My approach was to apply the changes one at a time until problems cleared up.

If I think about it some, it might be possible to simply suck up all of the excess memory in a DOS RAMdisk, using HIMEMX and XMSDSK with the /T (allocate from top of memory) option. I believe that XMSDSK claims to support RAMdisks of up to 4GB and there's nothing to prevent you from having more than one.
 
Windows98SE should work perfectly fine? I have a copy of Windows98se here and i've installed it in an AthlonXP 2ghz machine with 1gb of ddr, and AGP-2x and it runs perfect, even finds all 1gb of ram and everything worked fine... I don't have it installed on it right now to give you screenshots to prove it worked or anything though, because i reloaded it with XP and using it as a wirelress bridge behind the tv in the living room for the tv + blu ray player in there now. But it did work, and should work for you?

I didn't have to do anything special either, i just booted to the 98se cd, wiped the hard drive, formatted it clean, ran the setup.exe from the cdrom and it just went and worked fine.
 
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