Installing 98lite with SE & 95 (Guide)

[ZigZag]

For anyone interested, I got 98lite "sleek" and "micro" installed & booting. Used 98SE retail, and 95b retail (cache 37 tested -40 failed). Never use 95C for 98lite install.

Quick guide for how I did it (you can do it differently, but read for important error info):

Created VHD 4gb in Windows.

In ao486 used fdisk in from 98SE Boot floppy to create 1gb C: drive & rest as D: drive. Format C: & D: drives.

Back on PC mount VHD. Copy 98lite directory/files to D: (will have a different letter on PC no doubt, so name it something recognisable when formatting). Use winRAR to extract WIN98 & WIN95 folders from the install CD's to the D: drive.

***IMPORTANT***
Install fails even on certain real systems unless you have a copy of "olepro32.DLL" from a win 98 system handy. You absolutely MUST copy that file to somewhere on D: or you'll die of frustration.

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Installing:

On ao486 (cache 37) boot from 98 floppy & navigate to d:\98lite & install to D: drive (yes D:). When asked for Win98 files enter path D:\WIN98\ (just selecting drive D: should be enough but I'd use exact path to be sure) and for the 95 files D:\WIN95\

Once everything is copied & install is ready it'll start windows installation, here you can select C:Windows\ as your drive to install to. When it gets to around 90℅ it'll say it can't find olepro32.dll in CAB64, just browse to where you have it on the D: drive. Depending on install option it might complain about a few other DLL's or fonts, just "skip" them.

The install is guaranteed to freeze. To prevent this on first boot after initial hardware setup. To prevent this, I left the 98 boot floppy in drive during hardware setup so it didn't auto startup after reboot. Just eject the disk, reboot & press F8 to get Windows boot menu & boot into Safemode. Once loaded, right click "My Computer", select " Properties", click "Performance" tab, then under Advanced click "Filesystem", "Troubleshooting" tab and finally tick the "Disable all 32bit protected mode disk drivers" box. Reboot & let setup complete (if you missed the F8 you can always reboot once system freezes up & try again).

EDIT: You should probably disable virtual memory here too! Turns out it's the floppy preventing 32 bit disk drivers from working. You can disable the floppy & re-enable 32bit drivers. Pity I can't see a way to disable specifically for just the floppy.

It should work now. I'm as really snappy on my test install. Haven't had time to play about with it much. I recommend making a copy before messing about. I couldn't get Norton Ghost to work (no coprocessor), but mounted the VHD in my laptop & used ghost on there to make a backup. I then tested it writing to another VHD & it worked just fine on the MiSTer. If I could find a working clone software for DOS/Win9x it'd be easier doing it on the MiSTer. Keeping a system backup on the same VHD would be good & save long installation times.

[rhester72]

Just one tip - rather than cloning in-skin, it's far easier to just ssh into the MiSTer itself (without the vhd mounted or the core running, naturally!) and just make a backup/copy of the vhd from the command line. (It's also FAR faster.)

[ZigZag]

Just one tip - rather than cloning in-skin, it's far easier to just ssh into the MiSTer itself (without the vhd mounted or the core running, naturally!) and just make a backup/copy of the vhd from the command line. (It's also FAR faster.)

Thanks. My idea was to make the Windows C: partition as sleek as possible & be able to backup that to the D: partition on the same VHD. I find network and MicroSD access slow enough that when copying a full size VHD over it takes a bit of time anyway. I could keep the OS on a small VHD & games on another, but I find using multiple VHD's on a single MicroSD causes Windows to chug along slowly (if you also use virtual memory on SD you're a sado masochist).

I think it's probably time I got that old 1gb portable HDD I have somewhere formatted and attached to the MiSer. That'd make dealing with Win98 VHD's far more pleasant I guess.

[rhester72]

Oh, sorry, I was assuming there was room on the SD card for a backup, so you'd just copy from/to SD without involving network traffic, but I see your point...the slack space on the VHD is ignored by Ghost but copied by Linux. Maybe your strategy is faster (on a clean install, at least) after all. =)

[ZigZag]

Oh, sorry, I was assuming there was room on the SD card for a backup, so you'd just copy from/to SD without involving network traffic, but I see your point...the slack space on the VHD is ignored by Ghost but copied by Linux. Maybe your strategy is faster (on a clean install, at least) after all. =)

Yeah, even on my modern Win10 PC I keep the OS drive as lean as possible. Software gets installed portably or to another drive whenever possible.

A 120mb full partition clone should be quick to put back in even on MiSTer, and with all the testing needed for direct X & memory manager type stuff I'm going to destroy this installation in as many old and new ways conceivable!

[Glaurung]

Vhd download link would be nice

[ZigZag]

I can't post a link here as nefarious scumbags who do not legitimately own every single piece of software used would be inclined to download it illegally

[tlaloc]

Vhd download link would be nice

these 'might' work:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=windows%2098%20vhd

[jordi]

I can't post a link here as nefarious scumbags who do not legitimately own every single piece of software used would be inclined to download it illegally

not sure, as microsoft itself published the vhd on archive.org

[bootsector]

I can't post a link here as nefarious scumbags who do not legitimately own every single piece of software used would be inclined to download it illegally

not sure, as microsoft itself published the vhd on archive.org

I don't think Microsoft would do that.

[rhester72]

They didn't - I believe the poster is confusing publisher with poster.

[Glaurung]

This vhd doesnt work anyway.

[uigiflip]

could be the vhd used to be used in mac virtual pc maybe, has micrsoft bought that company out

[Caldor]

could be the vhd used to be used in mac virtual pc maybe, has microsoft bought that company out

I have used PCem on my PC to setup VHDs. It has helped me install Daemon Tools for example. But when I used it to setup Windows 98SE from scratch, it ended up having audio issues for some reason. I tried removing and reinstalling the sound card, but that did not seem to help.

The problem is sound effects often end up echoing a lot. But I am thinking it should work to take a VHD setup with AO486 and then just install f.ex. Daemon Tools with PCem. So far my best working Windows installation is Windows 95 OSR2.

[ZigZag]

Hard to get identical HW, functioning in an identical way with PCEM. I tried this a lot too. If you're going to do this my recommendation is install the OS & H/W fully on the MiSTer. Then use the image to set up stuff on PCEM (ALWAY MAKE VHD BACKUPS BEFORE MAKING CHANGES). I wouldn't trust it though, it always had subtle issues for me (sound being one).

The most reasonable compromise I could come up with was using PCEM with a 200mhz Pentium & settings as close to ao486 as possible as a test bed for installations for speed sake, but always once procedure & installation was figured out it's worth spending the time redoing everything natively on the MiSTer.

It took me several days to get the whole 98lite installed on MiSTer & that's not including any additional software. It's slow to set up. Also, if you haven't installed fresh on the official release do so. I found there were problems & it was slower using the version I'd installed on ”cache 37".

[Caldor]

Yes, that was my conclusion as well. Installing it on the MiSTer caused me to have sound issues, and not especially subtle either. It was pretty common to get an annoying echo effect. I thought it helped to remove and reinstall the audio driver but nope.

So yeah, install on the AO486, then if Daemon Tools or whatever refuses to install on the AO486, boot on PCem and fix it, and yes, have a backup ready. I try to do these setups on a 500mb VHD, to make it faster to run scan disk if needed, faster to copy it around and making backups.

But... I think there is a reason Windows 98 wont install without FPU, and that might be why there are these problems with some software. So I suspect its just best to stick with Windows 95 OCR2 or newer instead of Windows 98.

[uigiflip]

for a workaround the dll errors i copied the dlls from full win98 install and put in a dll folder so when comes point it too dll folder

[ExCyber]

I can't post a link here as nefarious scumbags who do not legitimately own every single piece of software used would be inclined to download it illegally

not sure, as microsoft itself published the vhd on archive.org

I don't think Microsoft would do that.

The details seem to be lost in the mists of the pre-2005 web, but as far as I know Microsoft can't distribute Win9x operating systems, at least not without Oracle suing them. They settled a lawsuit with Sun over Microsoft's Java implementation, and part of that settlement was to stop distributing a bunch of products. To this day, those products remain unavailable on MSDN/Visual Studio subscriptions, and not because they're simply too old; MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 are on the list, but 95, 98, and Me are all missing.

[mfncl]

Thanks for this! I followed the guide and have a decent 98lite setup.

Some things that are worth noting:

1) At the beginning, the VHDs must be partitioned and formatted using the legacy/DOS fdisk and format tools. Modern Windows partitioning does not work (even though you initialize as MBR and use FAT32 partitions..).

2) The Win98 boot diskette has the "format" tool compressed in a cab file. It is supposed to extract it during startup into a Ramdisk, but on my mister this didn't happen, possibly because the D: drive letter was already taken.

Workaround was to boot into a separate DOS VHD I had and partition and format the VHD from there. Then I booted to the Win98 diskette and marked the first partition "active" so that windows would install to it (C: drive needs to be C: drive in order to mark it active).

3) The Win98 install was smooth. No freeze because of the floppy device as noted in the OP. Possibly this issue was fixed in later core revisions.

4) Drivers: SB16 sound card works out of the box (turn the volume up). Display does as well, but not 1280x1024. If you want to use this resolution you have to force Windows to use the mister video driver and reboot. Nullmodem driver also working. NME32 has a YouTube video on the required setup to configure the modem connection.

[MiSTer_Kirk]

What would put the icing on the cake, as far as Win95/98 goes, would be a fpga of a GPU. Such as, the 3dfx voodoo1, S3 Virge, or a Kyro based GPU for some tile based rendering. Being able to have a complete DOS/Win combo FPGA core, with a GPU, in a small box would be amazing. I still have my Pentium II, Voodoo 2 8Mb, SBLive, CDRom, etc.. But it's getting too much hassle to find space, and keep it all connected.