SO.

I get Windows 2000 installed.

Works fine now.

Go to Win98 to check if things still work.

They don't.

Windows protection error.

I know exactly what caused it, too. I swapped the Sound Blaster Pro 2 in the system for an AWE32 so that I could get sound in Win2k. I uninstalled the Pro 2 drivers in Win98, installed the AWE32 drivers, and rebooted.

And then the install did the dead.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I think I'm just gonna leave it at Windows 2000 by itself. It's stable enough, it's got all the support I need, and if I really want to play DOS games on it, I could probably just make myself a FreeDOS usb drive and boot off that instead.

Comments

[Ferrum Requiem]

I have an old win98se computer just for vintage gaming. Love it to bits.

Mechwarrior 3, anyone?

[SweetAI Belle]

If the Windows 98 partition isn't working anyways, maybe you could just install FreeDos on it.

Or DosBox might work on Windows 2000. And when I went to the DosBox website, I noticed something talking about installing Windows 98 in DosBox.

--Sweetie Belle

[TheMajorTechie]

5030087
I think I'll go with the former. Wipe the disk, set up a new partition scheme to dual boot FreeDOS and Win2k, and load things onto the respective OS-es. Now that I actually know what works and what doesn't, I should be able to get it all done in just a couple hours tomorrow.

[SweetAI Belle]

5030088
Sounds good. And there are always guis you can slap on top of freedos if you want things to be a little more friendly. Maybe you could stick OpenGem over it or something.

--Sweetie Belle

[TheMajorTechie]

5030089
Perhaps. Though, I'll likely be staying more on the Windows 2000 side of things for most purposes. Since Office XP takes practically a lifetime to activate over the limited 10MBps ethernet card I have, I'm gonna instead use Office 2000. I can save and open files to and from a network drive from 2000, meaning I wouldn't necessarily have to rely on USB drives or floppies for file transfer.

Though, I do use an external boot manager on a floppy disk just for peace of mind. The BIOS only allows me to select from a list of preset boot sequences, and none of them are in the order I'd like them to be, so I just used the preset to boot floppies first and went from there.

[SweetAI Belle]

5030090
Yeah, I was mostly just thinking that if you were installing some games on dos, it'd be nice to have a menu or gui of some sort to launch them from.

Doing that with the floppy seems like a good workaround, though I'd make sure you have a backup floppy in case it goes bad.

Oh, tested, and that raspberry pi I found in my closet with a touchscreen does work, though the screen's the size of a gameboy advance. Maybe I could make a little box for it and find something to use it for. Trouble is I don't really have anything for making cases. Construction paper and some tape might work...

--Sweetie Belle

[TheMajorTechie]

5030095
Cardboard's always an option as far as the casing goes.

And don't worry, the boot manager I use on the floppy is PLOP boot manager. If anything goes wrong, I can download a new floppy image off their website and write a new disk. In the meantime, the current disk is set to read-only, and pretty much always stays with the computer.

[Sejen]

I really like my thin client, a "Fujitsu Siemens Futro S400"
I've got it running a multiboot of 95C, 98SE, XP Pro.
I think I'm covered for most of the Windows based retro stuff.
I just wish I'd found out about thin clients before I tried the proper route and cluttered up my room with my Corsair "cube".