techincal question about 98. xp, and games

  • Thread starter Patrick Pierson
  • Start date
P

Patrick Pierson

I have a question I would greatly appreciate any opinions on.

First, some background. In January of last year I bought a P4 2.2 machine.
It came with winwxpsp1 on it.

The main thing I use my machine for is playing games, more old dos and win
95/98 games than anything recent and xpsp1 just did not do it for them. And
yes, I know about compatibility mode.

I used partition magic to change ntfs to fat32 and then used a 98se
boot disk to fdisk and reformat the hard drive of the machine in question.
Then I installed 98se. It worked out great. All my old games worked
perfectly and the machine itself just flew along. (Obviously I changed to
the correct drivers and so on at the same time.

I have now ordered a new P.4 3.2 Mhz machine and am considering doing the
same thing again.

TO be clear, I am NOT asking which os is better overall because I know that
overall winxp is. But it is not so great for the types of things I want to
do at home with it. And this is not a merely a matter of familiarity
throwing my judgement off because I use xp at work, am familiar with it, and
know how to tweak it. But I do NOT like it for my retro gaming.

And yes, I do own a number of copies of 98se. I bought them up a few years
ago since I knew I might want them someday.

My question is technical:

Will win98se even work properly on a processor of the speed I am getting? I
know that speed was probably not even dreamed of when 98se was being
designed. But it works perfect on my current 2.2. Would that also be the
case with 3.2 or will be be crossing some invisible linitation if I try it?


Second, as long as I am asking, I also have a secondary question. I have ms
Java on a cd. If I end up installing win98se again I plan to install the
Java as well. But if I keep the winxpsp2 os can I also install it or should
I use the sun java, or use none.

I understand why sun won their lawsuit about the availability of ms Java and
that it is less open to some problems but I personal prefer the ms version.
So with winxpsp2 can I install majava pff my discs,
or is the sun java already there, or is there no need for either because of
some new and wonderful feature of winxpsp2 that makes neither necessary?

Any experiences, opinions, or even facts would ge grateful from anyone and
everyone. I am going to post this in a couple of places to increase the
likelihood I will get reply. There is no need to tell me about how I should
not case so wide a net, I want any minnows or dolphins or whales I can snag.

Thank you very much.
 
P

Paul Smith

Will win98se even work properly on a processor of the speed I am getting?
I
know that speed was probably not even dreamed of when 98se was being
designed. But it works perfect on my current 2.2. Would that also be the
case with 3.2 or will be be crossing some invisible linitation if I try
it?

Yes it should work fine CPU wise, although a lot of support for drivers
ended a long while ago for Windows 98, so you may have issues acquiring
drivers.
I understand why sun won their lawsuit about the availability of ms Java
and
that it is less open to some problems but I personal prefer the ms
version.
So with winxpsp2 can I install majava pff my discs,
or is the sun java already there, or is there no need for either because
of
some new and wonderful feature of winxpsp2 that makes neither necessary?

A lot of people prefer the MS version - it works out of the box for one,
your new machine may or may not come with Sun Java on, if it doesn't you can
always go to their website to download it.

The platform itself IMO is a dying one, all this extra hassle of users
needing to download it and then all the problems that came with that - a lot
of websites that used it simple said enough, and are using alternatives.
Java is slow, harder to develop for then competing platforms, and Sun as a
commercial entity is very shaky.
Any experiences, opinions, or even facts would ge grateful from anyone and
everyone. I am going to post this in a couple of places to increase the
likelihood I will get reply. There is no need to tell me about how I
should
not case so wide a net, I want any minnows or dolphins or whales I can
snag.

I'd recommend you check out Virtual PC
(http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx you can download a
45 day trial), rather then simply removing XP and using 98 (or even
dual-booting), it would allow you to run Windows 98, within Windows XP. So
you'd click a shortcut on your XP machine, and it will boot up Windows 98 in
it's own little Window, so you could use all old games with it. Pretty
cool. :cool:

--
Paul Smith,
Yeovil, UK.
http://windows.dasmirnov.net/ Windows XP Resource Site.

*Replace nospam with smirnov to reply by e-mail*
 
E

E McCann

The processor speed shouldn't matter with Win98. Other system bits might,
and driver support might not be there for "bleeding edge" tech (i.e. no idea
if PCI-X will need any special consideration,) but other than that, Win98
should work fine.

As far as Java, I just pick up Sun's version of Java - rather get it
straight from the source than someone else's interpretation of it.
 

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