Windows 98SE audio driver BSOD

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M3Stang

Commendable
Oct 12, 2016
16
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1,510
Found an old PC from when I was a little kid that is capable of running windows 98. I installed windows 98 SE and got my graphics drivers working for the GeForce 2 GTS with 64MB VRAM and was able to get chipset drivers. I could not get any PCI devices to work however. My sound card nor my integrated audio work nor does my LAN card. I plugged in some logitech USB headset I have and it actually installed the driver and the little sound icon popped up in the task bar. I go to adjust volume and the second the sound plays through the headset instead BSOD. If I reboot with headset in BSOD when the startup sound is about to play. Unplugged no problem. I know that WIndows 98 is super old but maybe figured I would take a shot in the dark here and see if anyone else has had these issues in the past 18 years lol.

AMD Sempron 2400+ at 1.67 GHz
VIA KM266pro mobo
512MB RAM
Winfast GeForce 2 GTS 64MB
Soundblaster Live
 
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ragnar-gd
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Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

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May 9, 2013
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If your nostalgic for wanting to run Win98, then you should use a emulation or better yet 'sandbox' to run it virtually. In fact if memory serves me, there was actually a 'Internet Web Page' based Windows95 you could run free for the 'fun of it'. Otherwise, your issue is Win98 is 16bit programming with a 32bit wrap around it to run 32bit code. Thus drivers would still need to be backward 16bit compatible - issue is at the moment we are running 64Bit code on the computer, phone, tablet, etc. your using.

Thus there isn't a 'way' to make it work. If you can't find some 'homebrew nostalgia' forum group on Google for Windows 98 AND then each piece of hardware someone can 'share' with you to put on floppy disks (Win98 can't read USB2 and USB3.0 devices we use like thumb drives, headphones, etc.) to load into the old system is about the only way you will find any answers. But honestly I doubt it, since your talking 20 years ago.
 
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M

M3Stang

Commendable
Oct 12, 2016
16
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1,510
I currently do have a new 6700k 16GB RAM GTX 1070 pc right now. I am having a hard time running any games from the late 90s on it. So rather than messing around with patches and what not I figured I have an old machine why not use it sort of thing. I remember these games working best on windows 98. Mostly old Need for speeds. Logitech's own website states that all USB headsets are compatible with Win98 and it seems that it is since it shows up in device manager the way it does on my Windows 10 machine. I have tried running it in virtual box, but without guest additions its useless. All of the hardware is from the late 90s. The lan card and the soundcard came out of an old Win98 machine my dad had. All of the drivers I sourced were from the manufacturers and were for windows 98. Even the installers said they were for windows 98. Having to burn all these CDs for different drivers sucks since I can't use flash drives.
 
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ac13044

ac13044

Honorable
Mar 25, 2016
846
1
11,165
yea feel the pain old classics games back then i think they still better than these new games. played them for ages rather than 11hours and it clocked. the 90s theme to it n all. for example crash bandicoot, oddworld, hogs of war jackie chan all them games were amazing haha i can play some of these on steam had to download an emulator to use for steam.

have you tryed this method https://play3r.net/guides/how-to-run-classic-games-on-windows-10-90s-pc-gaming-ftw/

 
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M

M3Stang

Commendable
Oct 12, 2016
16
0
1,510
I fixed the problem with the sound blaster. Headset and onboard audio still don't work but I had to copy and paste the driver exe from the cd to the desktop so it could create a directory. I kept trying to launch the EXE from the disc. Sound works great now.
 
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Tom Tancredi

Tom Tancredi

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May 9, 2013
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Okay as I mentioned those games and code and such are for 16Bit systems, which is why just 'running' them doesn't work in a 64Bit enviroment. Have you considered checking Good Old Games (www.gog.com). They are the archetype in recoding / enwrapping old games as your saying to work on current systems.
 
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ragnar-gd

ragnar-gd

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Sep 30, 2014
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Hi,
i'm a regular on a board that is dedicated to W98SE on more modern hardware.
With "modern" i mean i.e. an AMD FX 8350 (8-core at 4GHz), 16GB Ram, 970A-chipset, SSD, Gigabit LAN, Soundblaster Audigy 2, NVidia Geforce 7900 GTX 512MB, GTX 960 2GB as a secondary card for W10. This hardware also runs XP and W10 64bit, surplus memory was made invisible to W98SE by small patches.
.
Your hardware is a combo that is to run W98SE just fine...
.
BUT.
.
...also known to fail very often. Most of us retired VIA KM266(pro) long ago, and other boards from that generation/socket, as the chipset and CPU had several severe thermal hotspots, and many boards have thus either died already, show problems, or will die soon, once you use them.
The next AMD-Generation, which is socket 754, is much more stable, as AMD made great progress regarding energy-efficiency, so CPU and chipset had much lower temperatures, and hardware thus survived in a much better shape.
Although driver-problems are possible, even in your case, this is rather not very probable.
I'd recommend checking Socket 754 boards that have the same "size" as your momentary board on ebay, look up if the pages at Asus or MSI or whatever have drivers (very, very important, as there are many OEM-boards that don't have driver-support!), and then buy a supported board and fitting CPU. This should cost you no more than approx. 20$ per item, and might save you a lot of headaches and time. The rest of your hardware should run fine.

Any further questions?

Cheers,
Ragnar G.D.
 
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