jdgabbard Posted May 1, 2016 Share Posted May 1, 2016 You do have to have a driver for mass storage though. I can't remember where I found it at. But it was down the Google rabbit hole. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TPA5 Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 You do have to have a driver for mass storage though. I can't remember where I found it at. But it was down the Google rabbit hole. There's a generic mass-storage driver here: http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/usbmsd98.php I have used it once before and it seemed to work fine, but I can't make any guarantees. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 Yeah, I think that is the one I used as well. If I recall, it works pretty well. I have a 32GB USB stick that doesn't have any problems. I think I have also hooked up a 120GB external HDD. But can't be positive. I would test it, but my system is packed up, as I'm moving. It'll be a month or longer before I break it out. You'd be surprised about how common USB was. In front of me I have a PICMG Card with a Pentium I @ 133mhz, and 72-pin SIMM (to give you an idea of the age). It has USB onboard. Date codes on the bios is 1998, date codes on the ICs are mostly early '99 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 yea USB formally came out in 1996, my first pentium motherboard had it on there, and originally was a 90Mhz model (which got upgraded to a non mmx 166) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 Yeah, I can still remember when I swapped MoBo and uP for a K6-2. It had two USB ports on it and it was the coolest thing ever. Of course, there wasn't mass storage back then. Hell, I also though a laser mouse was the coolest thing ever (no more cleaning the rollers...), so take that for what it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 And of course, I felt the same way about a ZIP drive... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 I remember wanting to do USB mass storage, and while the PC side of the hardware was ready there weren't really any USB HDDs. They weren't out yet. I had to go with a bastardized and kludged Firewire drive that seriously failed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 Yeah, I think most mass devices (read: at least thumb drives) came out a little later...around 2003-04. I remember very distinctly while I served in the military (2005ish) having an officer come to me wanting me to put some files on his thumb drive. It was fairly large for the time being about 256mb if my memory serves me correctly. Later year the that year the 512mb sticks became prevalent. The following year I bought Sandisk (U2?) 4GB stick (which I still have somewhere). It was massive for the time. I think I had spent close to $35-45 dollars on it, or more. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 I recall paying nearly $200 for a 2GB SanDisk(1) USB drive(2) at the time - somewhere between 2000 - 2004 IIRC. It's fast and still works. I still use it for file transportation. I like it because it's built on big geometry and therefore more reliable and less prone to radiation. I was still in transition from the Apple II to the PC at the time, and was flabbergasted this tiny stick thing could hold cartons of floppy disks! 1- Why do people refer to these as ScanDisks? 2- I like the even more outmoded term, JumpDrive, coined by Lexar Media. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 1) Well, I think it has to do with the company SanDisk. 2) I mostly use flash drive, but also thumb drive, jump drive, USB drive, etc... The fact that I got a 32GB drive from eBay for $3-5 just goes to show how cheap these rings have gotten. And the fact that the standard size increased so much over the first few years really helps to show how fast technology advances. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted May 2, 2016 Share Posted May 2, 2016 I recall paying nearly $200 for a 2GB SanDisk(1) USB drive(2) at the time - somewhere between 2000 - 2004 IIRC. It's fast and still works. I still use it for file transportation. I like it because it's built on big geometry and therefore more reliable and less prone to radiation. I was still in transition from the Apple II to the PC at the time, and was flabbergasted this tiny stick thing could hold cartons of floppy disks! 1- Why do people refer to these as ScanDisks? 2- I like the even more outmoded term, JumpDrive, coined by Lexar Media. I paid a decent amount for my PNY 128 meg stick in 1999, still works like a champ, it actually gets used quite a bit shuffling files to the MS-DOS machine when I dont feel like farting around with networking 1) never heard of that 2) I like jump drive as well, but I was already in the habit of just calling them USB sticks before I started hearing that Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
English Invader Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 I was thinking about getting an older PC to tap the old school PC gaming library but, in the end, I decided that the sheer vastness of the PC library facilitated a more limited approach to collecting: A game becomes part of my PC collection if it meets the following criteria: 1) It runs 100% on Linux Mint through Play on Linux 2) It can be installed and used with no internet connection 3) It has to be a game I will play regularly It's early days and my "collection" is about 10 games so far but I'm enjoying the ride and I want to see how far I can go with these limitations. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 Another thing to keep in mind is you will need a floppy drive to boot the PC and load the CDROM, because those stupid asshats at Microsoft never bothered to make the 98SE disc bootable. As for USB mice and keyboards, there is an option on many motherboards for "legacy USB support" where it will treat USB devices such as floppy drives, keyboards, mice, etc as native devices. Only caveat is the USB device must be plugged in at boot to be used in legacy mode. SATA drives and CDROMs are a no go however. I had a terrible experience attempting to install Windows XP PRO 64-bit from a SATA DVD-WR drive in 2005, but that is another story. Also if you're doing win98, I would recommend getting the beefiest motherboard that will support it so applications don't run slow. Those old Athlon motherboards mostly still had driver support for Win98 and you could max them out with a 2+ Ghz XP processor fully populated with 3 x 1Gb DDR333 RAM modules. If you're gonna do it, you might as well pimp out the system. I remember Windows ME booted in ten seconds flat on an old Athlon rig I built. It was unreal but ME was extremely prone to crashing. 98SE was rock solid from my experience. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 Well to be fair most BIOSes never supported boot from CD till well into 98s life Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zap! Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 (edited) I have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop that I got for like $30. Not sure what model, because all the stickers identifying it were torn off (appears to be the 320CDT). It had Windows 3.1 on it, and the CD wasn't detecting. Well, I fixed it with a DOS CD-ROM driver, and just had to install Windows 95 on it. I then realized that I wanted better USB options (it has one port), so I put Windows 98 on it. I love it so far. With an 18 gig HD, it's more than enough space. Edited May 3, 2016 by Zap! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
accousticguitar Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 I have an old Toshiba Satellite laptop that I got for like $30. Not sure what model, because all the stickers identifying it were torn off (appears to be the 320CDT). It had Windows 3.1 on it, and the CD wasn't detecting. Well, I fixed it with a DOS CD-ROM driver, and just had to install Windows 95 on it. I then realized that I wanted better USB options (it has one port), so I put Windows 98 on it. I love it so far. With an 18 gig HD, it's more than enough space. That's a nice old machine! I have one that looks like it but I guess it's a bit newer since it came loaded with Windows 95. I still use it occasionally and it works great. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zap! Posted May 3, 2016 Share Posted May 3, 2016 That's a nice old machine! I have one that looks like it but I guess it's a bit newer since it came loaded with Windows 95. I still use it occasionally and it works great.Thanks! It actually originally came with Windows 98 when it was new, but for whatever reason the last owner put Windows 3.1 on it. Funny, because it reduced the hard drive to 2 gigs, because 3.1 couldn't handle it. I had to run fdisk and then format it before the HD was back to its original form. Sent from my Galaxy Note Edge using Tapatalk Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ZippyRedPlumber Posted May 9, 2016 Share Posted May 9, 2016 Ah, my favorite computer from my Childhood. :') A few years back, I bought a laptop just to play some of my old games mainly "Disney's Toy Story." It's definitely on the list of my favorite Windows OS alongside Windows 7 & XP. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatPix Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 Amusingly, I pulled from my stack of "things I should take a look at one of those days" a tower. A little config from around 1998. AMD K6, 128Mo of RAM, a 3Go hard drive... and Windows 98. I fiddled with it a bit, but I then upgraded to Windows 98SE and... wow, night and day. 98 was managign to access the ISA broadband card every three boots, SE got it right and solid. USB supprto was tedious on 98, 98SE had most drivers on the system or CD and was better. Oveall, 98SE managed to do better than I remember. Iexplore was a disaster tho, even Microsoft's own site doesn't want it XD. I isntalled Firefox 2.0 (not 20, 2.0) and it worked decently. I even went on the AA chat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 protip, get rid of any isa cards in that machine, just addressing a 16 bit card even on a Pentium creates a bottleneck in winders course keep the ISA card but in a PCI machine just removing the card and its drivers will give you an almost instant "hunh thats a little faster" bump in performance which shows up quite nice in benchmarks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 protip, get rid of any isa cards in that machine, just addressing a 16 bit card even on a Pentium creates a bottleneck in winders course keep the ISA card but in a PCI machine just removing the card and its drivers will give you an almost instant "hunh thats a little faster" bump in performance which shows up quite nice in benchmarks Not sure how much of that I believe. 16-bit Soundblaster ISA cards were still the most desirable back during that era. If there were negative performance issues I would think that people would have chosen something different. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdgabbard Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 Although, I will say that isa is notable slower than pci. But one or two cards isn't going to bog down a system that much. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keatah Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 They didn't chose anything else because of compatibility and cost. Slowdowns aren't all that noticeable, depending on what activity is on the bus and how good the chipset is.. So no big deal here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CatPix Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 I'll keep the ISA card. The sound card is not a Sound Blaster but come recognized as a Yamaha OPL3 which sounds good enough. Strangely, Windows 98FE recognized it but wouldn't play any sound from it now that I think of it. I don't plan to use this machine as a main computer anyway; it's a computer I found on the walkway so it's more for fiddling with an old system, play some old game on real hardware, and have a system that can read and write 5"1/4 floppies and still have the convenience of USB sticks and a GUI to move files. And I think I'll get more performance boost up to this point from upgrading to 256Mo of RAM. Which is the max that the MoBO will recognize apparently. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted May 10, 2016 Share Posted May 10, 2016 At that point - heck, at 128 already - you're better off with 2K or XP, aren't you? When I had a Celeron/700 with 64 MB RAM, it ran better on 2K than 98SE. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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