The Joys of KernelEx - Part 4 - Some More Games
5A system with newer hardware = greater compatibility with newer stuff. In this video, I manage to get a few more interesting games running under Windows 98SE.
So the background of this video is that I turned my IBM ThinkPad T42 into a Windows 98SE system, since my Pentium III rig, while nice, isn't really the best option for a KernelEx system, something I've probably mentioned in at least one of my prior KernelEx videos. The sweet spot for KernelEx seems to be in the Pentium 4/Pentium M/early Athlon 64 era of systems, since that's about the point most hardware manufacturers stopped officially supporting Windows 98SE. They seem to offer the greatest compatibility with newer applications, such as those that require SSE2, for instance. In terms of graphics, this particular system has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 with 64MB VRAM, which, as it turns out, is the system's party trick.
The Radeon 9600 was the best graphics option for the T42 (the T42p, basically the Dell Precision of the ThinkPad series, had the ATI Mobility FireGL T2 with 128MB VRAM). Being a close cousin of the famous Radeon 9700/9800, the 9600 is pretty darn capable - able to play a lot of modern games, such as the ones in this video, so long as they're DX9 games. Overall, the best graphics option for a Windows 98SE system is the nVidia GeForce 6800 and ATI Radeon X850 - officially. Unofficially, there exists a hacked driver that supposedly enables nVidia cards all the way up to stuff like the 9800GTX to run on Windows 98. That is something I'd actually kinda like to see. In case you're wondering, there doesn't seem to be any drivers, hacked or otherwise, that will enable the ATI X1xxx series and beyond to run on Windows 98.
Side note: There are some serious caveats to attempting to get the 9800GTX and similar to run under Windows 98SE. First off, I've heard that 98SE has problems with video cards which have greater than 256MB of VRAM. I *think* there's a workaround/patch for this problem. Second, your mileage may vary depending on how well the board you use supports 98SE/ME - we are well into PCI-E territory here, and that started gaining traction right as all the major hardware makes stopped supporting 98SE.
On the software side of things, I think this video is pretty self-explanatory. Some of the games I showed don't run 100% flawlessly, but there is one surprising game in this video that seems to run mostly effortlessly on this system! If I do make another KernelEx video, it'll more than likely be with the T42.
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