The QUEST For The ULTIMATE Windows 98 PC [Part 1] 

I know you get this comment a lot here but.... PLEASE MAKE A PART 2!!!!!!

The CPU cooler being the wrong way around is troubling me way more than it should!

Inverse sleeper: looks new; is actually running Windows 98

Can't call it ultimate 98 PC without Sound blaster live!

authentic win9x experience with all of the freezing and crashing

MattKC: "I am not sure how this went so wrong, so quickly." Druaga1: "Hold my SSD."

What you've built here is the opposite of a sleeper PC - a *woke PC*

I am doing a similar project. The first thing I would recomend is to just disable the onboard sound. Back in the Windows 98 days pretty much everyone used sound cards such as the Creative Soundblaster line. A Soundblaster Live! is probably going to be the easiest card for you to get hold of as well as one of the best quality ones for Windows 98. In terms of the graphics card you will probably be better looking at something a bit earlier. A Radeon 9700 Pro or GeForce 4 card will be about as powerful as you can get without running into driver issues with Windows 98 as cards newer than that started either reducing or dropping support for Windows 98 all together. I would also recomend using 512mb of RAM in the PC as Windows 98 tends to have problems when you have more than 1gb of memory which includes not just the system memory but that on your graphics card as well.

Since its the "ultimate" ... put two sticks of 512MB to enable Dual CHannel.... also check SATA controller max speed , you would probably get better overal performance with a fast HDD rather then SSD , since its the SATA controller that would be the bottleneck. Also check if you have RIAD available. And yea ... get a decent Sound Blaster and switch onboard sound off. Those early onboard sound "cards/codecs" were not offering true hardware acceleration for sound but rather emulating it, so they would usually slow down the system.

Dude, this video makes me appreciate how far Windows has come. It was such a pain in the ass back in the day. Anything could cause the system not to boot up properly or have weird glitches.

Give him some credit, he spent so much for your quench!

I can't help but feel the pain you've gone through trying to build this. Trying to install Windows 98 on hardware like that is like building a Lego set without the instructions. Best of luck with the project! I like both the video and your ideas!

I found your channel because of that one video where you put win 98 on the laptop.I stayed around because I love the content. Keep it up.

Mate, 2 sticks would enable dual channel memory. You want ultimate; I could be selfish and not tell you that.

My build pc (2007-2012 version) : - Motherboard: ECS 945gz/ct-m ; - CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core (E2140 1.60 GHz) ; - RAM: 1GB DDR2 266MHz ; - Storage: 149 GB Samsung HD (Sata).

the actual opposite of a sleeper pc

The adapters only work one way on most cards, only rarely in both ways on more modern cards.

Your channel just popped up on my recommended, and I'm glad it did. Your editing skills are on point. Keep up the great content man!

8:14 Him: You know what's better than a 1080p Monitor? Me: A 4K Monitor?? Him: A 2 1080p Monitors Me: .-.

I love all retro projects. Carry on to the next dude.

1st I want to applaud you for doing this, it’s very difficult, I can’t imagined, you reminded me of myself, dude I wish many many luck on part 2, soon u will figure it out, best of luck, never give up, I am truly amazed, you got this far Thank you for doing this

14:16 "Big NTFS propaganda" got me.

This video remind of me in the old days. I had seriously unlucky days like these from time to time. Never gave up :)

For the Windows 98 20th year anniversary, I just themed my current Win10 machine to look like Windows 98. Much, much easier! Most of the nostalgia without the hardware headaches! Still looking forward to seeing what you come up with. Good job!

The HDMI / DP adapters are always one way. When you purchase you need to keep an eye on the direction "HDMI -> DVI" It won't work backwards

Just in case anyone is curious, motherboard BIOS's of that era typically had a separate option to enable "Legacy USB support" that allows USB devices to work past post and pre-OS.

Love the build ! I also remember having just as much trouble back in the day getting sound working in 98. I think I went out and just bought a sound blaster and called it a day. You should see if you can find one with a gameport and get a joystick alongside your build and get Mech warrior loaded :)

Recently stumbled upon your channel, (actually, part 2 of this series, so watching out of sequence … blasphemy?) and I’m really enjoying your shenanigans. Keep up the great work!

Hi @MattKC! I'd sincerely like to thank you for this build/project. I admire that you even ventured it. I have a VERY rare KORG OASYS pci card (5v, 2.2) which only had support through Win 98 se/ME. Why wouldn't I just chuck this thing? It has EVERY single synthesizer that Korg made up to that point, including Korg Triton. It had a $2000 list price, was marked to $1200, and was $300 when I bought it in y2k. So literally, finding legacy support for the actual C-A-R-D in addition to OS was a challenge. I don't mind running any OS on metal, provided the hardware support was there. So in case anyone out there is looking for this video for win 98 as I was? and is looking to revive a PCI. Look up dell's info sheet for Dell PrecisionTMWorkstation 370. It literally says in the PDF that there is "Legacy support.... for 2.2" I've never seen any other info sheet that said that. And, also, as suggested, Matt - the year for this "happening" is around 2004. I would never have guessed that if I had not watched this video. Thank you very much from the bottom of my heart. PS - I will update if I get this shiznit working. Not sure yet if a rollback is in order.....or to which if win 98 se/ Me will have the optimum performance.

"WAIT THATS NOT ROYALTY FREE!!!" laughed a lot to that XD

Just came here first timer, so fun to watch even so i guess it must have been such a frustrating thing doing ;) will keep beeing around for part two thanks for doing it i was entertained a lot ;)

I had the same problem with the audio drivers back in the day. I don't remember how my dad resolved the issue but i remember him angrily working on that shit for a week. xD Good memories. Great Video im so ready for part 2 ^^.

It has been exactly one year since this video and I'm still waiting for part 2

Looks like dual channel memory slots on that motherboard. Also, strange how two graphic cards failed on you.

13:13 you have a setting for this issue in BIOS SETUP , search for something like "USB legacy emulation" or "USB DOS keyboard and mouse function" something like that :)

Hey man just found your channel. Love your windows 98 vids. That was the first windows I used.

Hey, what I can suggest, whenever I make setups like these and I have sound issues the easiest solution is to just use any 2000s sound card. Going out of your way to mess with BIOS is a bit too much. Thats why I keep a bunch of Creative Labs ones around, hehe

7:11 you should have gotten 4 sticks of 256 so you can run it in quad channel.

Superb! I've just found a 96-disk pouch with all my old W9x games, utilities and programs on, and have spent the last 3 nights getting my ancient IBM Thi(n)kpad 660E craptop (366MHz P2, 288M 66MHz RAM, 60GB HDD, XGA, CDROM, external floppy and ONE USB2,) up and running with it's Win98SE new install, and will spend tomorrow (a public holiday) loading everything from Wolfenstein 3D to MS Orifice 97 back onto it!

When several pieces of hardware are having tantrums with no rhyme or reason, it's normally the psu. Saying that, i remember onboard bios having some control over the audio back in the day, probably worth a look. Otherwise, great video, and thank you for not being boring!!

At long last! A video from MattKC!!!😁

16:03 That beeping is a sign about the GPU, The Graphics Card is dead so thats why

I would love to see a part 3! We need to see the best and fastest Windows 98 possible!

I'm building a project around the same motherboard and had this exact audio issue. If you decide to stick with onboard audio, track down the Realtek a3.89 drivers, which is just an earlier version of the 4.06 ones you tried. That worked for me with no crashing

Ah I remember when I bought my XP pc in 2003. It was my first PC that was really good and up the challenge of all the games my friends were already playing. After a year or so I hated XP and installed 98 SE. It was nearly perfect. Almost everything was running, it had full support for all the DOS stuff (Soon dosbox came out but it never felt quite right), a nvidia card for the newer games and generally everything was running very well. I only went dualboot and later abandoned 98 because of its insecurities. You would play one round of an online game or browse the web and the whole thing was full of viruses. Connecting that OS to the internet sometimes seemed like an unprotected orgy, and burned discs from friends didn't help that much either. And all the people sending spam messages to random IPs that windows would show as dialogs. Oh and I guess you have the Harley Davidson of Pentium 4s. I went for the X800, back then I feel it was the complete opposite of today, ATI had the cool video cards. 16:11 the greatest classic, my childhood in a nutshell

0:20 Hey, it's that Windows PowerMac from King of the Hill.

This so much reminds me my struggles pretty much whenever I try to do some retro project. :) (or in the old days, trying to get something to work on Linux - it was never easy). Sometimes you just run out of energy on the way to getting things to work.

Loved this video! Sent me down memory lane

The drivers bit really makes me grateful for certain aspects of modern Windows. Cant remember the last time i had to download drivers for something other than my GPU

6:57 I need to know the name of this amazing fire song

I’ve watched 3 or ur videos today and u have gained 1000 subscribers every time

Great video, I'm sure you put tons of work into this, subbed your channel, waiting for 2nd part and greetings from Poland :-)

The adapters working is probably not your fault. They are probably meant to be used in reverse (HDMI device to DVI display, and DisplayPort device to DVI display for the other one).

This has been a lovely train wreck. Can't wait for part 2

Really liked this. I would like to point out a few things for you, though: 1) Format does not write zeros - it only checks the surface for bad sectors and (fully) preps the drive for use with that partition. 2) Windows 98 will very much support formatting that full 128GB drive. All you needed to do is leave the drive un-partitioned and let Windows 98's setup do the partitioning and formatting for you (NOT FDISK...). I've done much larger drives with this method during Win98 setup and once setup starts and asks to use the full capacity of the drive - answer yes to the question and it will tell you to reboot. Once rebooted, start Windows 98 setup once again and it will ask to format the drive in which you just let it do that for you and it works! 3) The video adapters you were using are probably 'Active' adapters and not 'Passive' adapters meaning they only can pass the video data in one direction (not talking about the band, lol) and you may have had them hooked up in ReVeRsE... 4) Good job on troubleshooting why the machine wasn't POSTing. I figured I'd share a nifty trick that I use that helps in this situation as well; If the Motherboard isn't POSTing and you're not sure why and you have the power connected properly, make sure to have a PC Speaker connected, remove ALL RAM, turn the PC on without any memory installed and listen for any beep codes. If you get an annoying beep error with the RAM removed then the Motherboard is talking to you and there's a chance that the board is fine. If you don't get any beep codes after powering on with no RAM then this is usually an indication that the Motherboard has a serious issue and may not POST at all no matter how much you fight it especially if you know you have a compatible CPU installed!

This is why I dialled back my expectations a notch, I looked for the fastest and went for the ones under that which were more than fast enough but cheap enough and reasonably easy to still replace. I got an i865 board that supports up to a 3.4 P4 but got a much cheaper and easy to find 3.2. 2 sticks of 512MB DDR400, a soundblaster live! 5.1 and a Radeon 9800 pro. I also have my old trusty Voodoo 5 5500 PCI for the glide games and DOS. An IDE DVD drive to free up the left over sata port, a floppy drive emulator and a 240GB SSD with a 2x120GB partition with windows 7 on one just to trouble shoot, get drivers, file transfers etc., and trim the drive (98se has full access to the drive as well so it can be used for storage for that as well). I have an old PCI wifi card as well, but that was more trouble than it was worth so stuck to the on-board lan. Though most importantly, I put in a beeper so I could get some idea of what was not working if it ballsed up.

I remember... the PAIN in the ass that it was to make stuff work back in Windows 98... oh boy... (And don't get me started on troubleshooting...) I wish you good luck! *You'll need it.*

Everyone's living in 2019 where the world is falling apart... Besides this man. This man, he's living in the 90's, and loving every bit of it. I salute you sir. Long live the 90's and early 2000's.

Damn! Great video but you just look so defeated at the end :( I would be too, but this is great content and I’m still looking forward to part 2

I built a very similar 98 machine, but used windows 7 to make a small partition on the SSD to hold the 98 installation, and chipset drivers, the full install was 5 minuets. it worked flawless, using a P4M800PRO-M motherboard, P4-651 CPU, DDR2 533 and an AGP FX3000.

10/10 would add to config.sys again

*When you can't afford ultimate pc in current time*

thanks foryour video. I am so thankful this time with windows98 is over. and all these hardware-problems are over as well (mostly). and even the disk failures are over thanks to samsung ssds. Such a shit hard and software it was. thanks for showing, made my day!

Noice video! Thats a good build but... Since you are trying to build the ultimate win98 pc, wouldnt it be better to use a newer VIA chipset? The drivers on boards like P5VD2 works great on win98 if im not mistaken, and you would be able to use some newer processors in it (more cores! Yay!). Also, go for 2x 512mb sticks so you can have dual channel if you can.

My grandma heard you loudly say "big oof fellas" and i could feel her disappointment radiating from behind me.

4:48 im getting druaga1 flashbacks

Dug up one of those small Dell Optiplex 260 Pentium 4's. Though they came preinstalled with Windows XP, the hardware has official support for Windows 98. Finding drivers wasn't super easy, but after a day of frustration I got it to recognize all onboard hardware. Need to track down a low profile soundblaster live if those exist, as otherwise there is no MIDI playback in DOS games.

Looking forward to part 2, great video keep up bro

We’ve all forgot the second power supply cable & had a cable too short 🤦🏻the days

This *Yeah!* song edit is so underrated

You've got a few things going on, most of all, try getting away from a motherboard with onboard sound altogether and fit one of the PCI sockets with a Soundblaster. Second of all the 6800 in AGP was a bit odd. It was absolutely bottle-necked by the AGP slot but better late than whatever. It was mostly for those people who were really holding over/could not afford a motherboard with PCI-Express. Admiration for trying... I would keep up with it and find another one as it will kick the crap out of the next nearest neighbour which is your Radeon 9800 Pro. Just remember that you need both rails connected including the one to the GPU itself and make sure that your power supply is up to the task. Some of those power supplies can have really weak 5volt rails which can damage video cards like that... Keep us updated.

Thanks for uploading on my bday!!

13:53 it says right there "This disk cannot be QuickFormated." Quick formatting was a thing back then.

I used to work in a computer repair shop back when windows 98 machines would still roll in on the regular. What you're going through was pretty much my day every day. Before even bothering with anything else, always ALWAYS run memtestx86 and test the ram entirely. If that fails, you're wasting your time. I'd even recommend running a CPU test if you have one. These machine had all kinds of hardware issues that wouldn't immediately kill a machine, but instead degrade it over time (faster or slower depending on the hardware failure).

Try finding a Win98 compatible PCI sound card, and disabling the onboard sound card. The onboard sound chip may of failed. Verify you are running chipset drivers. If you have issues, running previous version may help. Also, I have found that workstation boards (or some server boards) will have more solid Win98 drivers than the desktop ones. Now I need to dig through my parts boxes and see what I have. Good video. Was fun to watch. Also, ditch the Bluetooth dongle... Win98 barely had USB, and Bluetooth wasn't even an idea until XP, so I don't see any actual use for it.

So this is a very interesting video and I do look forward to the next installment. A few things to note from someone who plays around with this sort of equipment a lot: Ignore the onboard sound. Although the best Sound Blaster Audigy and Live cards may not be that cheap, most are and would be far better suited, faster and reliable. Disable every device on the motherboard that is not going to be used - Windows 98 is better with IRQ's than earlier systems, but give it some help and turn them off. I would not use an SSD. The lack of TRIM support, AHCI etc is going to make it underperform by quite a hefty margin and you will kill the drive. In practice, it is probably better to look for a Western Digital Raptor which would be both period correct and I believe for W98 actually equally as fast (much slower under XP etc) I'm concerned at how many graphics cards you've lost, so try and check that PSU out. But meanwhile, have a look out for the 7800GS for which there are W98 drivers (I can send them to you if you want). The Gainward Golden Sample are the best cards as they often have 7800/7950 GT cores, but as they're so expensive, even a native 7800GS is faster than the 6800GT and in line with the Ultra I recall. Failing that, a 6800GT may be cheaper to get these days and had most the performance (speaking as someone who bought one new and still has it) If you can find it, this board is compatible with W98 and supports Core 2 Duo www.asrock.com/mb/via/775dual-vsta/ - they're a little rare but probably cheaper than your Pentium 4 and my testing shows that no P4 can match Core 2 Duo Good luck

6:38 Yeah I learned it from that infamous Verge vid...

I got windows 98 working on AMD Ryzen with AHCI, sound, 3D acceleration and 4GB RAM all native, no VM.

I'm certainly no expert, but I have a 6800 Ultra AGP and I remember putting a aftermarket cooler on it as it got quite hot :) My guess that's what happened to yours :) Great video, I always wondered what was officially supported on 98 I always thought the support for it ended around 2003 :D

10:30 I couldn’t believe you also done that, my friend did the same thing, we spent hours “debugging”

12:16 pickle rick

part 2 when???

I remember working at Taco Bell at the age of 15 my first job and begging my dad to take me to compusa to buy my first AGP with my first pay check. Ty for these videos, seems like my history hasn’t been erased!

Great effort so far!

Well, that wasn't very successfull! But on another note, at least I was entertained! :) I really hope it isn't another year for the follow up!

wasn't aware that big NTFS propaganda was a thing

I've found that using a sata-to-IDE dongle, to run the SSD to the IDE port stabilizes windows 98, or run HDD, but I've never used that mobo so it may be fine. Also I re-cap every AGP card I use, it's pretty quick and all cards in that era seem to have a bad cap or it'll go after a little use anyway. I love the build hope you get it going.

I feel your pain with the sound drivers. I cannot get my Windows 98 machine to have routinely functioning sound. I'm pretty close to replacing the Sound Blaster Live card in there now with an Aureal Vortex 2, just to see if that works any better. My machine is a _bit_ different though. I built a machine using ~~parts I had lying around~~ the last parts that could be reasonably expected to run 98, which I took to be around 2000. I've got a Pentium IIIS 1.4, a Voodoo5 5500, and 512 MB of RAM. I'll probably switch to a flash storage solution and get a new case, but I'm happy with what I've put together

13:31 What's the song in the background?

I also have hyper 103 ...I have zip tied it to my am4 mobo !

I've been building Windows 98 PC's for retro gaming recently and I feel your pain. My most recent 98 pc was a high end Pentium 4 similar to your build. I had hardware and driver issues that I could have never imagined. My most successful build was a Pentium 3 Tualatin. Generally speaking, I find it's best to use hardware that was built when 98 (or ME) was still the dominant operating system, which is prior to October of 2001 when XP was released. Drivers and hardware had excellent support for 98 up until that time. Additionally, I stay away from the 6000 series graphics cards for 98, the driver support is spotty at best. Nvidia supported 98 as an afterthought. Plus, the 6000 series dropped support for table fog and paletized textures, which can be important for older games. I usually use a geforce 4 or fx series because of these reasons.

My Win98 overkill is in exactly the same case, but I'm using a GA-EP31-DS3L with a Q9400 CPU, Radeon X600, rtl pci ethernet, ES1370 sound, IDE CD-ROM, 3.5 floppy & gotek floppy emulator. The chipset is supported by intel drivers, but you have to "manually" install the official drivers. Onboard sound is replace by PCI sound, onboard ethernet should work, I'm yet to try it. I also found 2x256MB DDR2-800 (talk about a narrow window). Case and motherboard were mine from new, everything else was cheap and easy to find.

*stares in horror as yet another RU-vid video idea is done, almost exactly how I'm going to do it, by somebody else*......

4:34 Oh I found one of my ram stocks lol I ironically have the same one

Feel no shame, my friend, you have delved into a mystery I might have never thought of but SHOULD have! Lol

I recently set out to "build" a win98 system like you did, in order to travel down memory lane a little bit and play some of my older games like mechwarrior3. I sort of cheated a bit by finding a beat up old PC at a thrift store for $8. Fired it up and it had win2000 on it. I did a fresh install of win98 SE. I had to replace the case fans, and motherboard battery, secure cpu heat sink latches, and plug in the powercord for the old vid card fan. Also replaced the cd player as the 2 that came with it were not working. Lots of driver problems. Took me 2 days of searching just for the vid card driver. Still working on other drivers. sound works. everything works. cant get mechwarrior 3 working though, because the game claims it needs directx6 installed. You go to install it from game disc, and an error says you already have directx installed. (win98 install disc apparently installed direct x of some version or other.) i have to see how to remove direct x, and install again. The fun thing is that there are tons of old video cards, sound cards and other parts out there for cheap. And the challenge of getting them to work right together. By the way I also tried all of the virtual machine options out there, and they all suck. (virtual box, win7 virtual pc, and vmware. The virtual machines dont seem to allow for choosing various virtual parts like video cards, so for win 98 you are stuck with 16 colors. compatibility mode on win7 is hit and miss a lot of times. win10 compatibility mode has improved a lot, but also is not always working out well for old games.

There are even cables with hdmi on one side and dvi on the other.

You can use core 2 Duo and core 2 quads in windows 98 and still maintain compatibility

Wow, I had that exact same IBM tower! Still have it, still boots and runs, 23 years old!

I think that u need the monitors to have vga output, if not mistaken those dvi on the graphics card only accept dvi to vga signal. The card doesnt boot, have you connected the power to it? Because theres to power leads on the front of the card and needs that. Issues aside, nice vid :) Congrats