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Thread: Win 98se vs Win ME

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    Pretzel (Level 4) LaughingMAN.S9's Avatar
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    Default Win 98se vs Win ME

    im currently in the middle of bringing my 12 year old gaming rig back to life to play mostly late 90's games and possibly a few early 2000 games if it can handle


    this is what i've been able to salvage

    1 ghz pentium III complete with original motherboard
    256mb rdram dim
    60 gig hd (may have a higher capacity hd somewhere lying around somewhere tho)
    nvidia GeForce 256 card (a little dirty but im almost positive can be salvaged)
    soundblaster live sound card
    50x cd drive
    3.5" floppy drive


    im pretty sure im going to need a new case and power supply but apart from that i think im good to go, only thing i cant decide on is which OS to go with or which would be better for my needs


    win 98 seems like the defacto go to right now being as i mainly want grim fandango and bladerunner up and running along with a few earlier rts titles (kknd, dune, command & conquer, dark reign) light 3d shit like quest for glory V and possible dos titles later on down the line but not a real deal breaker


    but i also want to be able to play games like max payne and giants citizen kabuto without problem and i dont know if they were win 98 compatible, which overall do you think i should choose?
    Last edited by LaughingMAN.S9; 09-01-2011 at 05:49 PM.
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    ServBot (Level 11) kedawa's Avatar
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    I'm pretty sure any game that plays on ME will work on Win98SE.
    None of the features added to ME are of much use for gaming anyway.

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    I recently resurrected my own Windows95 box and got a copy of Win98SE off eBay. CD-ROM had disc rot and it still installed perfectly!

    Looking online, both Max Payne and Giants: Citizen Kabuto support Win95, so you should be fine there. WinME is nothing but bad, bad memories for me. Sure, if you gave me a copy for free I'd take it but I wouldn't ever use it, except perhaps to boot up and laugh at. It's terrible.

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    I would go 98SE or Win2K. ME was HORRIBLE.

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    ME is straight up horrible. Windows 2000 is the best because it was more stable, very close to NT edition.

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    Pretzel (Level 4) LaughingMAN.S9's Avatar
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    lol only reason i mention me is because when i originally built my machine i had me preinstalled on it and it always treated me right, lol for about 7 or 8 months when xp came out and i just moved on, i didnt realize win 98 was supported for so long either, i honestly thought as soon as me rolled out, microsoft just stopped giving a fuck and moved on within that same year, good to know



    will i have any problems running 98se with any of the parts i have? specifically the 60 gig hard drive and the 1ghz pentium iii?
    "Kidnap the presidents wife without a plan..."

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    Banana (Level 7) fahlim003's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by LaughingMAN.S9 View Post
    will i have any problems running 98se with any of the parts i have? specifically the 60 gig hard drive and the 1ghz pentium iii?
    The processor is no problem but if the 60GB harddrive is in NTFS file format, Windows98 and lower won't be able to see it. Windows2000 will, so that's my recommendation if it's NTFS.
    Whaddya mean invalid parameters?!

    9,000 gigs of ram and it still can't answer a simple question!

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    ServBot (Level 11) kedawa's Avatar
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    Under no circumstances should you install Win2K for playing games made for Win95/98.
    It's a better OS, but it's not compatible with a large portion of 90's PC games. It also has basically no DOS support.

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    Just divide that hard drive into multiple FAT partitions. Sure the early 2000s era games might be in the 1GB+ range but most of the 90s stuff is measured in hundreds, if not tens of megabytes.

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    Go with Win98. WinME's DOS mode is gimped and older games that require DOS will not work.
    Mario says "... if you do drugs, you go to hell before you die."

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    Over at mdgx.com, there's instructions on how Windows 98SE can be selectively upgraded with some of the nicer features of Windows ME to create something the author calls "98SE2ME".

    I'm told ME really isn't as bad as some people say it is, provided you disable system restore and don't mind the hastily-removed DOS support. Here's a bit from the MSFN forums:
    ME is not for DOS-Freaks.

    ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

    ME is the most evolved Win9x OS and is more stable than 95,98 and SE.

    Don't buy the "Me is Beta" phrase that everybody badmouthes ME. The Truth : it shipped with prereleases of IE 5.5 and WMP 7.0, now what's that about - install IE 5.5 final or IE6 and WMP 7.1 or 9 and voila everythings solved. In fact the german ME edition came on two CDROMs : one OS, and one with WMP 7.0 final plus some bonus stuff to satisfy customers. The systemresore bug is a bug indeed, but theres a well-known and available hotfix and afterwards its solved. Systemresore works exactly like in XP and it is very reliable.

    It's few glitches can all be worked out, in generally it depends all on compatible Drivers : ME had the same problem as vista - when it came out there were only 98 drivers around, but ME wants WDM only. Otherwise ACPI wont work and system stability is in danger.Another thing to consider is that ME needs a lot of CPU power and RAM. 500 MhZ and far more than 128 MB will work wonders.

    ME has capabilities not found elsewhere in win 9x :


    full ACPI aware: improving cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation, OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers

    WDM Driver modell throughout the OS, less use of VxDs for more stability. Needed for ACPI to work its magic.

    Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) instead of TWAIN , still used in XP, support for PICT-Cameras and Scanners ( lots modern devices use this protocol ).

    Universal Plug and Play ( UpNp) , detects devices on the network automatically.

    Built in Windows 2000 TCP/IP and NDIS networking stack and architecture, more reliable, full-featured, stable and offered better performance over the 98SE stack .

    Support for networking over FireWire, IrDA, ( Bluetooth capable with 3rd party drivers like Toshibas famous stack ) a network diagnostic troubleshooter, outstanding Home Networking Wizard which let people share folders,printers or set up a connection-sharing with offline-machines.

    native USB support for Mass-storage Devices and external CD/DVD devices, better USB-printer support.

    native Firewire support, for DV-Camcorders and the like (think of the Moviemaker application )

    far better memory handling than 98SE, especially if more than 256MB Ram is present. Depending on mainboard you wont have to workaround the 512MB - "bug", I have seen PCs with 1GB and ME without any tweak running stable.

    Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) , Distributed COM+ ,MDAC and JET database working in background like in XP, mainly used for diagnostic-wizards and the PC-Health services like :

    SystemRestore, automatic Regstry backups,Signature-Checkers for Files ( ME uses *.CAT files like 2000 and XP ), resulting in System File Protection, automatic recovery of overwritten or deleted core-files ( that's why a Servicepack is hard work, you cannot simply overwrite OS-files with custom ones )

    Help and Support Center is by far more userfriendly and interesting to use than 98SE's HTMl-Help. You can access the Microsoft Knowledgebase / Support website inside this application. When you click on the support options you get access to DXdiag,Systeminfo, WMI,Dr Watson and all other system-diagnosis tools. Built in wizards and Troubleshooters.

    Multimedia inside, unseen in any Consumer-OS before : MovieMaker , WMP , Internet Games, DirectX Voice chat,DVD,Onlinestuff, MS Agent "merlin" as your talking OOBE- wizard makes this the total multimedia-Windows out of the Box .
    DVD player supports software decoding for playback of DVD movies without a dedicated decoder card


    Better and feature rich Windows 2000 like Explorer :


    Image Preview: In Windows Me, images can be viewed by using the Image Preview utility. It allows users to rotate an image, print or zoom in/out an image. Image Preview supports images with .BMP, .DIB, .EMF, .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .TIF and .WMF file formats.

    Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes support for ZIP files through a shell extension known as Compressed Folders; allows users to create, access and extract files from ZIP archives similar to a regular folder in Windows. The user can also restrict access to files with a password.

    Search facility is integrated into Windows Explorer ( very much like the XP one )

    Accessibility extras : Onscreen Keyboard,magnifier, Speech .. prettty good for people that need it.


    Well.. that's not all, but the topnotch argument to choose this over 98 my friend.

    last my own extra Remark : I have a MS wired keyboard 500 with multimedia buttons, pause/play/Home/Favorites/Calc and such..

    In Windows 98 and 2000 I need " the Intellitype software" to make them work..

    Only In ME and XP they work without any running software at all Wink

    Those little surprises are worth it, believe it or not..

    Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..

    but for XP-feature seeking and multimedia-loving people on older or less powerful hardware or the need to have games and apps running fast as possible ( I do a lot of Photoshop 7, Poser 5 on a 256MB equipped ME Machine - dont even think of that under XP !).
    Quote Originally Posted by LaughingMAN.S9 View Post
    win 98 seems like the defacto go to right now being as i mainly want grim fandango and bladerunner up and running along with a few earlier rts titles (kknd, dune, command & conquer, dark reign) light 3d shit like quest for glory V and possible dos titles later on down the line but not a real deal breaker
    I'm pretty sure a lot of those will run on a modern machine without much persuasion.

    Quote Originally Posted by fahlim003 View Post
    The processor is no problem but if the 60GB harddrive is in NTFS file format, Windows98 and lower won't be able to see it. Windows2000 will, so that's my recommendation if it's NTFS.
    You do realize that even if the drive is NTFS, it's trivial to reformat it, right? NTFS isn't embedded in the hardware or anything. (Using FAT32 on large hard drives isn't especially recommended for performance reasons, though.)
    Last edited by J'orfeaux; 09-01-2011 at 10:07 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by J'orfeaux View Post
    You do realize that even if the drive is NTFS, it's trivial to reformat it, right? NTFS isn't embedded in the hardware or anything. (Using FAT32 on large hard drives isn't especially recommended for performance reasons, though.)
    Who said it was embedded? Also, who is talking about reformat, seems to me you're the only one with that idea. I said to simply not bother if your harddrive is NTFS since Windows 98 cannot access the drive in this format. I'm well aware that performance goes down after ~40gb and up with FAT32 so logically if you want to format an NTFS hdd into FAT32 and partition every 40gb, so be it. I still stand by what I said, I would suggest 98 and if not that then 2000 (there are tweaks for 2000 as well which have added support, much like what you've posted for ME).
    Whaddya mean invalid parameters?!

    9,000 gigs of ram and it still can't answer a simple question!

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    Quote Originally Posted by fahlim003 View Post
    Who said it was embedded? Also, who is talking about reformat, seems to me you're the only one with that idea. I said to simply not bother if your harddrive is NTFS since Windows 98 cannot access the drive in this format.
    That's like saying you shouldn't buy a house just because you don't like the color of paint on the walls. If I am the only one with the idea of reformatting, I do not comprehend why that is the case. (It's not like the performance penalty is a total deal-breaker.)

    I mean, sure, there are reasons to run Windows 2000 instead of 9x or ME, but it does not strike me as a particularly good reason to do so just because a random hard drive just happens to be formatted to NTFS, as that can be very easily changed.

    (there are tweaks for 2000 as well which have added support, much like what you've posted for ME).
    I think it is quite safe to say that there is no way Windows 2000 will ever be as compatible with Win9x games as WinME, as Mr. kedawa suggested.
    Last edited by J'orfeaux; 09-02-2011 at 12:18 AM.
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    Why not dual boot Windows 98 Second Edition with Windows 2000 that would allow you to use one to recover the other if it crashes and it allows real mode DOS
    Windows Millennium Edition isn't as bad as some say it is, it just isn't as good as it should have been. It was the latest home OS for just a few months, not enough time to work out the bugs. I am posting with Windows 2000 and I have used every Microsoft OS since Windows 3.0.

    Edit: Oops, I hit quote

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    I've used a few WinME computers that ran unbelievably well. I think the problem most people had was with their hardware not being powerful enough to handle it.

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    I have absolutely no idea why people claim Windows ME was "horrible". It was significantly more stable and refined than Win98. However, there is one critical difference to a gamer: no pure DOS mode. WinME removed real mode DOS, which you may as well have if you are going to play old games. That is the only practical difference for a pure gaming PC.

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    Quote Originally Posted by J'orfeaux View Post
    That's like saying you shouldn't buy a house just because you don't like the color of paint on the walls. If I am the only one with the idea of reformatting, I do not comprehend why that is the case. (It's not like the performance penalty is a total deal-breaker.)
    You're the only one who suggested reformatting was "trivial", nobody myself included say outright that you should not reformat. I clearly said in my last post that you can reformat NTFS into FAT32 for use in 98 if the user wants, I'm not opposed to the idea, I simply said to avoid using NTFS if you can since 98 can not use it. I know of countless people who've reformatted into FAT32 but I've personally never had the need.

    Quote Originally Posted by J'orfeaux View Post
    I mean, sure, there are reasons to run Windows 2000 instead of 9x or ME, but it does not strike me as a particularly good reason to do so just because a random hard drive just happens to be formatted to NTFS, as that can be very easily changed.
    Easily changed yet trivial? Also, there is a wealth of tweaks for 2000 if one is so inclined to look and again speaking from personal experience I found ME to be more headache than it's worth compared to when having worked with 2000. 98SE or bust for old games, the end.
    Whaddya mean invalid parameters?!

    9,000 gigs of ram and it still can't answer a simple question!

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    Quote Originally Posted by fahlim003 View Post
    You're the only one who suggested reformatting was "trivial", nobody myself included say outright that you should not reformat. I clearly said in my last post that you can reformat NTFS into FAT32 for use in 98 if the user wants, I'm not opposed to the idea, I simply said to avoid using NTFS if you can since 98 can not use it. I know of countless people who've reformatted into FAT32 but I've personally never had the need.

    Easily changed yet trivial? Also, there is a wealth of tweaks for 2000 if one is so inclined to look and again speaking from personal experience I found ME to be more headache than it's worth compared to when having worked with 2000. 98SE or bust for old games, the end.
    Not trying to be a smartass, but do you know what "trivial" means? It really just seems like you don't from the above post. I'll also suggest in support of J'orph that reformatting is indeed trivial. In fact, I thought it was pretty standard practice to re-format anytime you were doing a clean install of a new OS. I always have, anyway.

    As to the question of the OP, I'd go Win98. It has become the standard for running older stuff, so beyond working pretty well for most games, there is also more community knowledge and support available. That's the best reason IMO.

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    Quote Originally Posted by J'orfeaux View Post

    I'm pretty sure a lot of those will run on a modern machine without much persuasion.

    not on a 64 bit system it wont, i mean it can with alot more than just a "handful" of tweaks here and there, but still, thats alot more trouble than im willing to suffer thru, plus i already have these pieces lying around and i was just going to torrent windows 98 anyway so might as well right? lol
    "Kidnap the presidents wife without a plan..."

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    google "virtualization" you can run both operating systems on a more modern computer/operating system in virtual machines allowing you the ability to play both modern and classic games without needing multiple computers to get around driver issues.
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