Recommended settings for Windows 98 SE on high end systems?

[Turaltay]

Hello everyone,

i tried many ways to emulate a Windows 98 SE guest system and it seems to work good with PCem.
Could you recommend me the best settings for my host system?

OS Windows 10 64-Bit
i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
16 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970

I have many old games which i want to install. Am i limited in setting the HDD or is there a recommended size? I found a article which says max. 16383 cylinders, is that right?
Thank you in advance!

[tk421]

For my PCem emulated PC I am using a Pentium 233 MMX with 64mb of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, Sound Blaster 16, and the Voodoo 2 graphics card paired with any of the high end 2D or 2D/3D emulated graphics cards. I use any of the Virge DX, Phoenix S3 Trio64, Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge), ATI Graphics Pro Turbo or ATI Video Expression. I use whichever card will work with the program the PC is going to run. Normally I do not use more than 32mb of RAM but some Win98 programs need 64mb of RAM to work properly.

PCem would allow you to use a big hard drive size, about 128 GB in size. This is a very large hard drive for Win98 SE and you may be limited to using a small amount of that, perhaps not more than 37 GB. It was normal back then for Win98 PCs to be limited to just 7-8 GB hard drives.

I find PCem performance to be top notch, with no system stability issues of any kind. My files are still there, months after starting to use PCem on my new laptop using the i7 9750H CPU. I find performance to be as close to the real thing as could ever be the case. There are some bugs I am working out, but these are the very rare exception.

When running Win98 SE, I find that PCem works best with the Pentium I CPU and not the K6-2. The Pentium II is not yet emulated, and given the performance of the Pentium I and the K6-2 through K6-III+ CPUs, it may be some time before modern computers catch up to the speed necessary for Pentium II emulation to become viable. I find the K6-2 performs much better than the K6-III, but speeds tend to be limited to 350 Mhz with the K6-2 before performance takes a noticeable hit. The Pentium MMX is much more reliable, even at 300Mhz.

I hope this information is helpful.

[leilei]

I've used 40-60gbs fine with Win98se guests just as i've had in 1999-2005. It's those older Socket3/7 BIOSes that were fussy about hard drive size heading into 7gb at best (many large drives had a jumper for limiting to that for compatibility reasons) though you'd also be able to install that EZ-BIOS (supplied with some large drives then) to get them to work (which, by the way, also works in pcem).

[Turaltay]

For my PCem emulated PC I am using a Pentium 233 MMX with 64mb of RAM, a 2 GB hard drive, Sound Blaster 16, and the Voodoo 2 graphics card paired with any of the high end 2D or 2D/3D emulated graphics cards. I use any of the Virge DX, Phoenix S3 Trio64, Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 (S3 Virge), ATI Graphics Pro Turbo or ATI Video Expression. I use whichever card will work with the program the PC is going to run. Normally I do not use more than 32mb of RAM but some Win98 programs need 64mb of RAM to work properly.

PCem would allow you to use a big hard drive size, about 128 GB in size. This is a very large hard drive for Win98 SE and you may be limited to using a small amount of that, perhaps not more than 37 GB. It was normal back then for Win98 PCs to be limited to just 7-8 GB hard drives.

I find PCem performance to be top notch, with no system stability issues of any kind. My files are still there, months after starting to use PCem on my new laptop using the i7 9750H CPU. I find performance to be as close to the real thing as could ever be the case. There are some bugs I am working out, but these are the very rare exception.

When running Win98 SE, I find that PCem works best with the Pentium I CPU and not the K6-2. The Pentium II is not yet emulated, and given the performance of the Pentium I and the K6-2 through K6-III+ CPUs, it may be some time before modern computers catch up to the speed necessary for Pentium II emulation to become viable. I find the K6-2 performs much better than the K6-III, but speeds tend to be limited to 350 Mhz with the K6-2 before performance takes a noticeable hit. The Pentium MMX is much more reliable, even at 300Mhz.

I hope this information is helpful.

Thank you for your recommendation. I looked at some tutorials and put the following machine together. Could you tell me what you think about it? I added some questions to some points.

Board:
Machine: [Socket 7] Award 430VX PCI
CPU: Intel Pentium MMX 200
Memory: 256 MB --> Is there no benefit by using 256 MB or why did you choose 64 MB?

Graphic
Device: S3 ViRGE/DX
Speed: Fast VLB/PCI
Voodoo Graphics: checked
Voodoo type: Voodoo 2
Framebuffer memory size: 4 MB
Texture memory size: 4 MB

Sound
Device: Sound Blaster AWE32 --> Could there be any problem by some games if i use this instead of Sound Blaster 16?

HDD
Sectors:63
Heads:16
Cylinders:16383
Size (MB):8063 --> Are the values for the sectors, heads and cylinders correct and what would i need to choose for 10 GB?

[tk421]

Thank you for your question.

For your 10gb hard drive, 20807 cylinders will set the size to the amount you want. The number of heads and sectors would stay the same (default PCem). The size of my emulated hard drives is always dependent on the task at hand.

I never used the AWE32, so I would not know if there are any benefits to using it over the Sound Blaster 16. I have used the Sound Blaster 16 with no problems.

I always felt Voodoo 1 + 2 performance in PCem was amazing. For games like the X-Wing Collector Series (X-Wing 95, TIE Fighter 95, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter Flight School) and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, the Virge DX with the Voodoo disabled is the best option. For games like Star Trek: Armada, the Virge DX can work with the Voodoo 1 or 2. My graphics speed is set to slow VLB/PCI. I am not sure if there are any benefits to using Fast VLB/PCI. You may use whichever setting works best.

The Pentium 200 MMX is a great choice if you ever have speed or performance issues in PCem. I usually go with either the 233 MMX or the mobile Pentium 300 MMX using the socket 7 430VX motherboard.

For RAM, I have never used 256mb of RAM with Win98. For a Pentium II system the most I ever used was 64mb. For a Pentium III I had 128mb of RAM. I know the Pentium MMX works fine with 64mb of RAM. leilei has provided great advice about how big your hard drive can be. Even a Pentium MMX system can support such a large hard drive. If your Pentium MMX emulated machine works well with 256mb of RAM, that is great! If not, your system will run just fine with 64mb of RAM. If necessary, you can reduce that amount to 32mb of RAM. Again, this is task-dependent.

For any emulated hardware in PCem, your computer's CPU has to do all of the work reproducing the functionality of the emulated CPU, video card, sound card and so forth. The less demanding the task, the better PCem performs. On a modern PC, I find the Pentium MMX emulation to be reliable and dependable, especially if compared to the more modern K6-2 CPUs.

I always try to keep my PCem emulated machines configured as they would have been back in the day. I also do my best to configure my systems to meet my needs. I have emulated machines ranging from a 386sx to a mobile Pentium 300 MMX, they all work great apart from the very rare bug. I really appreciate the work the developers did making PCem amazing.

I hope this information helps. I wish you the best!

tk421

[Turaltay]

Thank you for your question.

For your 10gb hard drive, 20807 cylinders will set the size to the amount you want. The number of heads and sectors would stay the same (default PCem). The size of my emulated hard drives is always dependent on the task at hand.

I never used the AWE32, so I would not know if there are any benefits to using it over the Sound Blaster 16. I have used the Sound Blaster 16 with no problems.

I always felt Voodoo 1 + 2 performance in PCem was amazing. For games like the X-Wing Collector Series (X-Wing 95, TIE Fighter 95, X-Wing vs TIE Fighter Flight School) and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, the Virge DX with the Voodoo disabled is the best option. For games like Star Trek: Armada, the Virge DX can work with the Voodoo 1 or 2. My graphics speed is set to slow VLB/PCI. I am not sure if there are any benefits to using Fast VLB/PCI. You may use whichever setting works best.

The Pentium 200 MMX is a great choice if you ever have speed or performance issues in PCem. I usually go with either the 233 MMX or the mobile Pentium 300 MMX using the socket 7 430VX motherboard.

For RAM, I have never used 256mb of RAM with Win98. For a Pentium II system the most I ever used was 64mb. For a Pentium III I had 128mb of RAM. I know the Pentium MMX works fine with 64mb of RAM. leilei has provided great advice about how big your hard drive can be. Even a Pentium MMX system can support such a large hard drive. If your Pentium MMX emulated machine works well with 256mb of RAM, that is great! If not, your system will run just fine with 64mb of RAM. If necessary, you can reduce that amount to 32mb of RAM. Again, this is task-dependent.

For any emulated hardware in PCem, your computer's CPU has to do all of the work reproducing the functionality of the emulated CPU, video card, sound card and so forth. The less demanding the task, the better PCem performs. On a modern PC, I find the Pentium MMX emulation to be reliable and dependable, especially if compared to the more modern K6-2 CPUs.

I always try to keep my PCem emulated machines configured as they would have been back in the day. I also do my best to configure my systems to meet my needs. I have emulated machines ranging from a 386sx to a mobile Pentium 300 MMX, they all work great apart from the very rare bug. I really appreciate the work the developers did making PCem amazing.

I hope this information helps. I wish you the best!

tk421

Thank you! This informations helped a lot.

[ruthan]

I wonder for those are using bigger FAT32 disk image with WIn98, are such machines stable and is disk performance good? I have some issues at least with MS-DOS 7.1 and FAT32 DOS.. but i dunno know if im alone.. its my machine and config problem, or its some emulator bug. I tried Win98 machine with 8GB FAT32 with previous PCem version, it worked somehow, but i didnt do too much testing.

Otherwise if you want really high end machine, get real HW
I got Win98 working on X58,Z67 chipsets.. And its not just some pointless benchmarking machine, its working for gaming quite good, with XP, Win7 and Dos and Linux multiboot, multi GPU per OS.. X58 is nice because is with X79 chipset last with when you can get Dos PCI sound cards working, majority of Dos games are working with sound too:
https://docs.zoho.com/sheet/open/8mn7n8efd4da1b3034db1a04bf92a9209e034/sheets/OS-CompaMatrixBestMultiBoard/ranges/F94