Tag Archives: Windows 98

Compaq Presario 5222

To restore the image, you need to manually select the recovery image from the explorer window, select the FACTORY.PQI from the Q drive (That’s the CD drive mapped to Q)

Password is ZZZHIND

The program can be quite unresponsive, the only thing you can do is wait until it loads.

After recovery has completed, the system will reboot into the Setup screen here you will need to enter the OEM serial key and registration details as with your typical Windows 98 setup.

Windows starts to detect the new hardware and we get a BSOD from the Aureal driver. This ends up crashing the entire PC. Rebooting will take us back into the driver wizard but we still get blue screens due to the sound driver

Trying to remove the old driver by booting into safe mode and uninstalling it from there, this mostly worked but then encountered a hard crash with the below:

Not sure if this is considered a fix but I ended top removed the entry from the system.ini file and that seemed to stop the crashing. Not sure what this does but hey, as long as it works

Don’t know what this thing that keeps crashing, a quick search revels some Yamaha sound driver

On the subject of sound, the VmWare sound drivers will fail to install since they expect 98SE, and this is the first edition of 98. There were further problems with installing the standard Creative driers since these VM’s use a fucked up PCI/IRQ steering which the drivers cannot handle. The solution was to edit the VMX file to remove the PCI bridges, and to manually add the legacy sound card.

Following this archived guide is what worked for me:

https://web.archive.org/web/20200808203541/https://www.howson.pro/windows-98-vmware-fusion-sound-fix/

What’s annoying is most of the online literature assumes Windows 98 is 98Se which isn’t the case for this version, so a lot of the solutions will not work. I suppose you could always upgrade it to Windows 98SE, but that’s too easy isn’t it?

Don’t forget to uninstall the Yamaha and Aureal drivers, they will cause issues with the Creative sound card. You can easily do this form the Add/Remote programs applet from the control panel

Eventually we get the system into usable state

The main desktop, its defiantly an Internet PC which means a low end Celeron/Cyrix system with a 56K modem and internet orientated software.

Compaq Carbon Copy – A remote support software. In the event you experience technical problems, you can contact Compaq who would then be able to connect to your PC and provide remote support. Looking in the software you can also use this over a LAN with other computers that have this software installed. You can also use this to transfer files and voice chat to the other user, kind of amazing pulling that off on a dial up connection.

Netscape Communication also makes an appearance, this appears to be a customised Compaq version that has additional bookmarks added by Compaq. The Quicken 99 is included along with Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 99, this seems to be very common with OEM systems. Encarta was like our Wikipedia of the 90s, only it wasn’t publicly editable since all the data was held on the CD-ROM.

This version of Netscape also comes with support for the Cosmo VMRL plugin which allows the browser to display 3D models and graphics within the browser.

Compaq QuickRestore which is a utility to restore your system back to factory defaults, and to create boot disks. This interface is very 90s, even with the spinning Q logo.

Intel Video Phone, to make visual phone calls. This software typically came with Intel branded webcams. Now I’m not sure if both users had to be running the same software or if it was comparable with other video phone software like VDOPhone, I believe there was a standard (H.263) butI’m not sure how well adopted or supported this was. The help file does reference calling recipients with other software so it might have been compatible in that regard.

You can also make traditional phone calls, though not when your PC was connected to the internet.

I don’t believe this would have worked with 3G phone when they arrived, as they would have used the 3GP standard.

Compaq’s easy access utility lets you adjust the soft keys that are featured on the Compaq keyboard. You can configure this to point to a specific website or program. By default this would have launched your homepage or opened your default email client.

There is also a tray icon with a menu that can be brought up by right clicking on it. This appears to emulate the soft keys on the keyboard.

The is an onscreen display that appears when you adjust the volume. This can be adjusted or disabled altogether and is similar to the OSD of a regular TV of the time.

And that’s it, there is additional software like the Yamaha and Aureal sound programs, but these won’t function without the actual hardware being present.

IBM ThinkPad i1400

Leave a reply

A compact netbook laptop released around 2000. Lets look at a recovery image for that laptop.

Something’s gone wrong, where are the start menu items?

The Program Files folder does not look good…

Well for some reason the install script that ran after you reboot wasn’t converting the directories back to the respective lengths, so they were stuck at 8 characters. I believe this is called 32-bit file access?

The only way to fix it was to reformat the hard drive as FAT16 and then retry the restore process again. Eventually this worked but we are limited to 2GB, though we could later convert to FAT32 and expand the partition back to 8GB. I can’t image they would have used FAT16 on the actual laptop since it came with a 4.3GB hard drive, according to a few archived product information pages. Might be a quirk with the recovery utility.

Also for your own sake, If you’re using VMWare make sure you are using hardware version 6, as using later versions means you are stuck having to install a bunch of PCI to PCI bridges. I swear there are 30 of these to go through and Windows 9X always wants to search for a driver for it. The later hardware versions offer no advantage for operating systems this old.

Post Install

After a few driver issues, the sound drivers were not installed automatically but a separate driver install is available here for VMWare guests – https://archive.org/details/win95-98-driver

There’s an OOBE registration process where you can fill in your personal details to personalize your install. This is only available in VGA since this runs before we can install the VMWare SVGA drivers.

Once we are at the desktop you can see the Access Thinkpad which resides on the desktop and gives access to common programs and functions depending on what you want to do. Clicking on I Can will show you different tasks like Writing a Letter or Send e-mail which will open Outlook. This makes the system easier to use as a newbie might not be aware of Outlook but might want to send an email that they have heard of. Power users might also find this useful as a shortcut to quickly send an email. Some links will open help dialog boxes that provide further information.

If this is annoying or you prefer a traditional desktop you can close this via the X in the right corner

Also regarding the wallpaper, it’s a very corporate blue style background that would expect to find in your typical office.

As with other IBM installs, you also have custom colour schemes, wallpapers and sound schemes.

For security we have Norton Anti-Virus 5.0, which the virus definitions are dated March 1999. I wonder how this fares against the common malware/worms of the era. Like other Anti-Virus programs it will run in the background and scan files automatically that could be suspicious. There is also a LiveUpdate utility to download new virus definitions.

Quicken 99 also comes included for our financial needs

IBM Update Connector makes another appearance, this would check for driver and software updates for the included IBM software. Not sure if it supports Windows updates since you could use Windows Update for that.

TrackPoint properties lets you view and adjust the features of the Trackball which was commonly unique to IBM’s ThinkPad as an alternative to the trackpad. Here you can adjust the sensitivity, enable the press-to-select feature and adjust the scrolling method.

Mediamatics DVDExpress , enabled you to play back DVD’s which would have been a very high-end feature for 1999. This would have required some sort of MPEG2 decoder or accelerator since processors of the time couldn’t decode this software, so it wouldn’t work within VMWare. It looks to be a custom branded version with IBM logo’s added on.

Features of the software include parental control that works off the age rating of the disc, and the ability to change the region of the DVD drive. There is also a 256 colour mode, cant imagine what that would look like.

IBM Global Network Dealer lets you set and configure different phone numbers or internet providers to dial out to, back when dial up was the main method of using the internet.

One observation I found is the Windows Explorer windows are designed to be as minimal as possible since this laptop had an 800×600 screen.

ESS AudioRack 32 – lets you play MIDI, CD music and DAT tapes? Clicking on open brings up an open dialog box for wav files. Despite using the VMWare SoundBlaster, this appears to work well for playing MIDI and WAV music files.

IBM Easy Launch Buttons, these act as shortcuts to open preferred programs or links. They use the same colours as Teletext/fastext keys found on televisions in Europe with the red/green/blue/yellow that correspond to a function. When a button is pressed, an onscreen text of the command appears on screen in bright green, simulating the OSD on some older Sony CRT TV’s of the time.

How to register your ThinkPad model, this would have given discounts in purchasing software from IBM, probably Lotus SmartSuite office.

Checking for updates using a restored version of the Microsoft Update, Using windowsupdaterestored.com

Other software included is RealPlayer G2/v6, RingCentral Fax and Config Safe. Many of these have been covered in a similar install.

Sell Also

Recovery Image Download – On Archive.org, unlocked to work on any system

Information on ThinkWiki

Sony VAIO PCV-70 – Part 2

Leave a reply

What happens when we try to upgrade Windows?

Original Install

The PCV-70 originally shipped with Windows 95, but can be upgraded possibly to Windows XP. Along the way you will have to upgrade the processor and the amount of memory to run modern versions of Windows, which is easier to do in 86Box (4.0.1)

For this I’m more concerned with how far the OEM install can take us whilst maintaining the existing install. And what applications that Sony shipped with the PC still remain functional.

Windows 98

Great, something called HWINFO has crashed. That’s always a good sign

Install appears to continue though

A couple of reboots and Windows 98 starts to initialize its driver database

Not this shit again, thankfully the installation continues

Install was successful with the welcome to Windows dialog appearing

The VAIO Space appears to work OK

Another casualty is the WOW application. Wipeout also no longer launches, I won’t count this since we are not using a RAGE 3D accelerator (No 86Box support for that yet)

VAIO themes, wallpapers and colour schemes have been preserved

Windows ME

Looks like I need to bump up the CPU speed, so ME allows us to install. Enter the Pentium running at 166MHz

Again, Seriously? What is this and why does it keep crashing through an upgrade?

Something else went wrong

Windows Media Player seems to have taken a hit during the install

VAIO space is up and running, but some of the program links are missing. Also we are unable to launch the CD player or any of the multimedia applications

Netscape Navigator also has issues, but this is a very old version (2.0)

And Windows Media Player now works, not sure how?

No major issues were found with other applications, though losing functionality from VAIO space takes away one of the unique features of the PC.

Windows XP

Sadly we hit a roadblock here, as we do not have enough disk space to complete the upgrade (We have a 2GB hard disk with 652MB free, but Windows XP demands at least 800MB)

Perhaps I can expand the VHD. It’s worth noting the original system only came with a 2.1GB hard drive.

Even if we got XP installed, it’s a struggle running it on a 200MHz Pentium through 86Box, any faster and the emulator starts to throttle the speed. Might be worth revisiting in the future but for now ME is the best we can get.

IBM ThinkPad A20M

Leave a reply

A similar laptop to the ThinkPad T20, but this appears to be a customized image for a specific University. Lets take a look…

The recovery utility is very similar to what we have seen previously. This will restore the operating system installed to the hard drive, and will initialize it if the drive is blank. Once completed the system will restart.

Currently using 86Box (4.0.1) with the Gigabyte GA-686BX motherboard, which has a similar chipset to the actual notebook itself, Intel 440BX chipset.

After a few New Hardware Dialog boxes, we arrive at the desktop. Here we have Windows 98, compared to Windows 95 that the T20 we look at came with.

Very similar to the T20 we have the IBM custom wallpapers, sound schemes and colour schemes that can be selected. There is also a custom wallpaper from the Carolina Computing Initiative which is the default wallpaper and it appears this is a disto that’s intended to be imaged on ThinkPad laptops for a North Carolina University.

I guess IBM had a facility where institutions could create their own recovery images, complete with their own branding and any additional utilities to allow these images to be distributed to all notebooks that are used within that institution.

Office 2000 looks to be preinstalled for us, this includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Access, along with a sidebar to quickly launch Office. Not the best idea for a laptop with a small resolution screen (640×480) since it takes up valuable screen estate. Thankfully you can disable this.

The Start menu showing preinstalled applications, and one of the custom IBM colour schemes

CCl Laptop Tour: A tutorial application that is built using Macromedia Flash (Now Adobe, now dead). This provides information regarding the laptop itself, and is to help get students accustomed to using their new notebook. Information on installed software is also included. One thing to note is this program is very noisy, with swoosh sound effects for every animated text on the screen. It reminds be of creating PowerPoint presentations using PowerPoint 2003 and littering the slideshow with different animations and sound effects to make it more cool.

Norton AntiVirus 2000
Norton AntiVirus 2000
Norton AntiVirus 2000

Norton AntiVirus 2000 comes with the install, here you can run virus scans (or set a reoccurring schedule), and make system backups to floppy or Zip disk drives if you have one plugged in. Like other Thinkpad’s of the era, this model supports the SmartBay that lets the user swap and install drives whilst the system is active, and Zip drives are supported using this bay.

Norton also included a Liveupdate feature for both program and virus definition updates, but this just crashed the program, and the entire system

ConfigSafeEZ makes a copy of critical system files, kind redundant when you have Norton Rescue installed

IBM ThinkPad A20
IBM ThinkPad A20

A couple of ThinkPad utilities come included:

Battery MaxiMiser – a simple program that informs the user on how to get the most from their battery. The Presentation Director Wizard shows you details on how to connect and enable an external LCD projector or display. You can change the external resolution which will scale the internal display (since it only supports 640×480)

We also have Netscape Navigator 4.7 preinstalled as an alternative to Internet Explorer, showing the default homepage of the era using theoldnet as a proxy server.

WS_FTP
WS_FTP
WS_FTP

WS_FTP appears to be an FTP (File Transfer protocol) program to connect to remote FTP servers, This has already been configured to connect to an Ipswich server, though there are plenty of other servers included by default.

Tried connecting to a few servers (Microsoft, NASA) but no luck

WinAmp 2.5 is also preinstalled to playback MP3’s from Napster

CoSession Remote 32 (v8.1) – A remote control program that lets you control a desktop computer (That also has the supporting software installed) over a network, similar to Remote Desktop or VNC. It will also function over the internet and can be used to transfer files.

Main use for the program would be for Helpdesk support purposes, or if new software needs to be installed remotely. I’ll have to look at this in more detail when I find another copy.

Lastly a look at the IBM Update utility

Links

Product Information

Unlocked Recovery Image

Sony VAIO PCG-505G

Leave a reply

The VAIO goes portable

The Sony Vaio 505 was a line of laptop computers that were first introduced by Sony in the late 1990s. The Vaio 505 was known for its thin and lightweight design, which made it a popular choice among mobile professionals.

The Sony VAIO 505 series of laptops were available with different variations of the Intel 440TX chipset, which was a popular chipset at the time of the VAIO 505’s release in the late 1990s. The chipset provided support for Intel Pentium III and Celeron processors, as well as support for AGP graphics and up to 1 GB of RAM. Some variations of the Vaio 505 also included integrated graphics using the Intel 810 chipset.
Closest match we have is the Intel YM430TX which uses the same i430TX chipset as the VAIO laptop.

The (cracked) restore utility, this requires us to have a HDD that is already preformatted to FAT32. IF this isn’t done you will need to use the FDISK utility found on the Windows 9x bootdisk to set this up. Also if you have two or more CD-ROM drives the install will not be able to mount the optical drive, as it assigns it the letter Z:

After the restore has completed we are booted into Windows 98, the first edition.

OEM Customization

A few wallpapers are included with the VAIO water being set as the default, other wallpapers include VAIO Sky (As seen in the PCV-70), VAIO Earth and VAIO Wind.

A screensaver is also included, the PictureGear Screen Saver which acts as a photo screensaver that you can link your images to. Up to eight image files can be used with transition effects.

A customized Welcome To Windows screen, with a fifth option for launching the Vaio desktop space.

Included Software

Start Menu with its own category for preinstalled VAIO software

VAIO Space

Demonstration software that details the features and capabilities of the notebook. It also provided tutorials. It was a pre-installed software on Sony VAIO computers that provided a centralized location for managing media and accessing online services.

FrontPage Express

FrontPage Express was designed to be an easy-to-use tool for creating basic web pages without requiring any knowledge of HTML coding. It had a simple interface that allowed users to drag and drop images, text, and other elements onto a page and arrange them as desired. It also provided basic formatting tools, such as font and color selection, and allowed users to preview their pages in a web browser.

ScribblePad

Some models for this laptop had a touchscreen along with a stylus which allowed the user freehand input. TO take advantage of this Sony had included their own ScribblePad utility. This was a necessarily as Windows 98 did not include any pen input functionally (That I know of).

VoiceMemo

A utility for recording notes in text or voice format. These remain on the desktop after creation and can be moved about freely, similar to the sticky notes on Windows 7. The background colour can be customized using the standard Windows palette along with the font style.

PowerPanel

A very interesting utility that lets you control some of the power features of the laptop. The CPU speed can be adjusted to a slower speed to conserve the battery, You can also switch the HDD into standby immediately rather than wait for the OS to do it, and switch to standby or hibernate mode.
The PowerPanel appears as a sidebar on the desktop than can be set to autohide if its not needed.

MediaBar

Some sort of Sony branded music CD player, kind of redundant since Windows 98 already comes with one, unless this plays some specific Sony format? Video files in the AVI/MOV or MPEG format can be played.

PictureGear WallpaperMaker

A software program developed by Sony Corporation that allows users to create customized wallpapers for their computers. With this, users can choose from a variety of pre-designed templates or create their own custom wallpaper designs using their own photos or images. The software includes a variety of tools for editing and manipulating images, such as adjusting brightness and contrast, adding text and graphics, and applying special effects.

Sony Notebook Setup

Graphical BIOS utility where you can change settings without having to enter the BIOS.

PhoneTools

A utility to manage phone calls, Fax and user contacts.
It also appears to support cellular 2G GSM modules to make add receive phone calls over a mobile network, and there is also support for SMS messages. Alternatively you can connect a Sony phone to the computer instead, and use its GSM modem for an internet connection.

NEC Ready 9748

Leave a reply

NEC is no stranger to x86 computers having a respected line of computers in Japan under the PC98 branding. The PC98 is a family of personal computers that was popular in Japan in the 1990s. NEC was one of the major manufacturers of PC98 computers, which were known for their compatibility with Japanese software and games. The PC98 ran on a proprietary operating system called PC-98, which was developed by NEC and other Japanese companies.
Outside of Japan NEC had a minor presence with the Powermate line for the business and enterprise market, and the Ready line for home and small office market.

This is one of their many models that NEC had around the time which were being sold as complete home PC’s that featured bundled software and internet compatibility (being sold with an internet browser package, or ISP software)

Getting to boot the recovery image was a bit of a complicated dance. The CD itself does not seem to be bootable, despite there being files on there that suggest so. Plop bootloader did not appear to be able to boot the disk either.

First thing I tried was to use a Windows 95 boot floppy to cd into the floppy directory and run the bat file which I assumed would begin the recovery process.

Instead it gave me the finger and the recovery must be started indirecrtly

What I had to do is open the iso and extract the floppy directory to a folder, and then use WinImage to create a bootable floppy disk using those files that were extracted from that folder. Now this could be forgiven as NEC were possibly using a BIOS that did not support CD-ROM booting, or the hardware was using non standard CD-ROM drive like a SCSI drive (Unlikely but possible, since the Ready series were their budget line of PCs)

Once we booted the floppy, it picked up the CD and began the recovery process. It appears to transfer a few files to the hard drive.

Another recovery process begins, but this time we are givern a few options on how we want to proeed with the recovery. I chose the second option which began to format the hard drive (so what was the point in copying those files in the first place?

After the copying is complete we are invited to reboot into Windows setup, where the install will continue. This is where the drivers are initialized and detected.
Strangely we are not prompted to enter a product key or any owner or regional information, odd but not a complaint as this makes the install more streamlined.

After this has completed we are rewarded with our new windows desktop, though we are not finished with the recovery just yet as we have another install utility to go through.

A nice thank you from NEC, followed by another reboot

The NEC Welcome program that invites us to reegister our system

Software

Welcome to Windows, this appears to only have three options, also a sneak look at the NEC assistant

iRiS AntiVirus: A relatively unknown series of antivirus software, seems rather basic even for its time.

Microsoft Entertainment Pack: A suite of games such as Chip’s Challange, Tetis, SkiFree and Tut’s Tomb

NEC Merlin Assistant

This is situated on the bottom right of the screen and also appears in the system tray. Mousing over it will bring it up. The main buttons are the Features and Internet buttons, which will bring up links to the Net Media player, Planet Oasis, and Network NEC. These require you to sign up with an internet provided using the NEC provided wizard.

This can also be used to set a custom wallpaper to a NEC branded one, these do not appear in the desktop wallpaper section of the display properties. Instead you have to click their button to cycle through them.

Sample backgrounds:

Other Software

These have been seen so many times in OEM installs

Microsoft Works 4.5: Basic productivity software

Microsoft Word 97: Popular word processing software, only Microsoft World is included here, not Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook.

MGI PhotoSuite 8.05: photo editing software developed by MGI Software Corporation. It was originally released in 1997 and was one of the most popular photo editing software of its time. It is designed to provide users with an easy and intuitive way to edit, enhance and manipulate digital images. The software includes a wide range of features such as image editing tools, special effects, filters, borders, frames, and more. It also has a user-friendly interface and provides step-by-step tutorials and wizards to guide users through the editing process

Quicken Basic 98: Quicken Basic 98 was a popular personal finance management software at the time of its release, and was designed to help users manage their personal finances and budget effectively. It helped to establish Intuit as a leader in the financial software market.

eMachines eTower 466ix

1 Reply

The eMachines eTower 466ix was a budget desktop computer released in 1999 by eMachines. The system was made available with an Intel Celeron clocked at 466MHz, 64MB of RAM, 4.3GB of storage (which varies based on the model) and integrate Intel graphics. Windows 98 Second Edition is the operating system used here.

Recovery Install Process

Recovery is started by booting from the CD. As with other eMachines recovery software we need to have a pre partition disk (does not need to be formatted but must be initalized using the FDISK utility) before we can begin the install.

Had to switch motherboards after the recovery was complete as I got hammered with IOS errors upon bootup, changing to the ABIT LX6 worked much better. Plus it had the advantage of having a similar if not the same chipset as the original motherboard, albeit with no onboard ATI video.
The eTower also had a Crystal sound chip onboard along with the software but we can sort of substitute it with the Crystal 4236B ISA soundcard that is supported in 86box.
Windows 98 does not seem to come with a driver, so a third party driver must be installed.

Desktop First Boot

Windows 98 boot screen, with the Microsoft logo on the top right.

Looks very similar to the eMachines eMonster that was also a Windows 98SE based install, but we see a lot less software bundled and installed.

The eMachines website, or whats left of it

OEM Customisation

We get a few emachines desktop backgrounds for us to use:
E – Windows 98 dark blue background with the emachines logo centred
Emachine – the emachine logo in 800×600
Ewall – same as Emachine but zoomed out slightly, also 800×600
Ewalls – low resolution of Ewall, at 640×480

The Musica sound scheme is set as the default with no customer schemes included or set.

Included software

eWare

The eWare bar come bundled and appears at the bottom, but on top of the Windows taskbar. This will show shortcuts to popular internet website in addition to a few adverts right on your desktop. There are dedicated buttons for shopping and search engine sites.

Most of these are custom affiliate links which haven’t been archived by the OldNet, so we just get an error page.

There is also an option to take a survey. There is also some sort of search function that similar to Sherlock that’s included on MacOS 9 that can pull search results from Yahoo, Lycos and AltaVista.

Voyeta AudioStation

An audio/MIDI playback application which functions only on Crystal soundcards, at least for the one bundled here. This means it wont function on say a Creative Soundblaster but if we use the Crystal 4236B ISA soundcard in 86Box and install the appropriate drivers (they’re not bundled in Windows 98) we are able to use the application. Again it gives the appearance of a mid 90s home HiFi.

ATI Video Player

A simple video player that makes use of the video acceleration that some of ATI’s RAGE chipsets had supported. 86Box does not exactly emulate a RAGE based chipset but we do have the ATI Mach graphics cards to use instead.
It does work somewhat, I can playback AVI files with the exampling being one pulled from Microsoft Garden Home software. The video can be scaled in size and mentions support for MPEG video.

Other Software

Microsoft Works: A basic office Suite, Works 2000 Version 5.0 is installed here.
Netscape Communicator: A shortcut exists on the desktop but it not completely installed opening it will launch the 4.6 installer. This will also install RealPlayer G2.
AOL 5.0: Also has to be installed from the desktop
Adobe Reader 3.01: It’s a bit old as its copyright is dated from 1997 and Reader 4.0 was released in April 1999
Microsoft Money: Finance management software

Links

Archived discussion of motherboard specifications

Restore CD – Archive.org

HP Pavilion 6630

Leave a reply

An early 2000s desktop PC running Windows 98SE, designed as a basic desktop PC for simple web browsing as evidenced with its included software which is geared to the casual home user.

The Pavilion is HP’s brand of conventional desktop PCs tailored to the home market, similar to IBM’s Aptiva and the Dell Dimension line.

According to an archive CNET page, it has a Celeron 500MHz processor with 64MB of memory and a 10.2GB hard drive. For 86Box I used a smaller 4GB hard drive and a slower processor to ease on the emulation. Variations of this model exist with different optical drives, hard drives and processor combinations with some coming with AMD K6 processors and CD-R drives.

Engadget

Starting the recovery process, which just inflates the OS files from a previous install. There is no instillation wizard, HP just took an install and made a restore image out of it. This does mean a lot of New Hardware dialog boxes will appear due to this, and I had originally intended to use it on a HP Brio motherboard in 86Box, but had great difficulty with resource conflicts and BSoD’s. The Virtual PC profile/motherboard worked much better instead.

With the old VM it even thought the floppy drive controller was a tape drive.

Post Restore

We are booted into a wizard that asks us to confirm the licence agreement, set the keyboard layout, confirm our region and our OEM product key. After a reboot, another wizard starts:

Before we get to the desktop, we are invited to complete the registration wizard where we enter our name, address and our product key which would have been provided in a separate booklet.

And then after that we are given a tour of the operating system, as some users may have been upgrading from a Windows 95 system, or might even be their first PC. This goes around the basic elements of Windows 98 and gives an animated demonstration of navigating Windows Explorer. This also complement’s the built in Windows tutorials for Microsoft.

Desktop

The Windows desktop with some of HP’s customisations. You will notice the HP Internet Manager, which provides easy access to various internet sites and are sorted by categories affirming that this computer was designed for the consumer that wants to browse the internet.

Clicking on any of the links (Such as Shopping) will open Internet Explorer with a customised link to that page. It sort of works in a similar manor to the internet channels included with Windows 98 and is HP’s replacement for the channel bar. Also, when you click on a link, large green text appears to the bottom left of the screen showing which button you clicked. I think this is supposed to replicate the OSD of many TV’s of the 90s where volume would be displayed in that style of display.

Sadly most of these links are long since dead, and the wayback machine does not hold any archived copies, possibly because they were not designed to be indexed. All of them lead to a paviliondownload.com domain.

Whilst we have Internet Explorer open, we can see the Yahoo! Toolbar that was preinstalled. Yahoo was popular at the time and was the common homepage for many users, similar services were AOL, Lycos and AOL. As for Internet Explorer, version 5.00.2614.3500 is installed.

HP have also bundled a few favourites (Bookmarks) of their own with links to their corporate and dedicated Pavilion homepage.

Also another look at the green OSD, it appears when you adjust the volume too. You can actually customise this in the HP keyboard utility. Changes that can be made include the duration of the message, colour and font size.

Themes and Customisation

We can see HP have included a customised desktop wallpaper, in fact there are four of them provided in different colours (Purple, Green & Blue) and HPStndrd which is a lighter version of blue.

HP also added three custom colour schemes that can be selected in the appearance tab, again the choices being Blue/Green and Purple

Also a shot of the system properties box, with the OEM logo and support information.

Bundled Applications & Utilities

Microsoft Encarta 2000 – Preinstalled but requires the Encarta 2000 disc in order to do anything.

Microsoft Money – Finance management software, the 2000 edition is used here.

Microsoft Works – basic productivity suite that includes a word processor, organiser and a spreadsheet application.

Trellix – Some sort of website builder that included a few templates that allowed for users to create and build their own website. I wonder if they will work with WordPress?

Quicken – Basic 2000 comes preinstalled and is a personal finance management utility, similar to Microsoft Money which was also included. I guess here you’re supposed to populate this with you bank statements and recent purchase’s, so you can get a rough idea of your balance history.

There’s a few online services included within the Online Services folder – AOL, AT&T WorldNET, Disney’s Club Blast, EarthLink, GTE Easy Sign Up, MindSpring, Prodigy internet and Compuserve.

Also, a Games and Entertainment category in the Start menu. Here you can find links to RealPlayer G2 and MusicMatch JukeBox which was a popular MP3 music player, along with a link to Emusic.com. There are also shortcuts to Windows games like Solitaire.

There is a My Yahoo program in the Start Menu, clicking on that takes you to an internet connection wizard that is HP branded. Since we are connecting via LAN, we can breeze past this. Dialup internet was a very common way of accessing the internet and would have been the de facto way of getting online, but was also around the era where cable and DSL broadband internet was starting to become mainstream.

HP Help: Help and support centre for novice users. This can give information about your HP system and comes with a link to the user manual. This does require a separate CD that has this contained, it is not saved on the hard disk.

FAX (QuickLink III) Fax application, if you cannot use the built in Windows fax utility.

Lastly we also have McAfee security suite which can be found in the system tools folder. This includes the anti-virus and the V-Shield that acts as a firewall. A necessity as Windows did not come with any virus protection at all, that was left up to the end user or the system builder and may would bundle either McAfee or Norton Security.

The typical Windows 98 experience

Additional Links

Recovery Image – Archive.org – This version is cracked which allows for it to be installed on any PC or virtual environment and is an alternative to a regular install. There are two versions with the November 1999 being linked, an August 1999 version exists but has not been tested, perhaps that’s regular Windows 98FE?

Acer Extensa 700

Leave a reply

A first look of a typical Acer OEM install

The Acer Extensa 700 was a high end business class laptop released in 1998, and came with a Pentium II processor running between 233 – 300Mhz, offered 32 or 64MB RAM and came with an integrated 56K dial up modem. Optional docking accessories were made available supporting DMI 2.0

Although 86Box has a few Acer branded motherboards, there are a few issues in getting them to run due to the erratic keyboard controller they implement. For these its recommended to use the VirtualPC BIOS which can be found in the miscellaneous section of the motherboard list.

The Restore utility

Originally these restore images were designed to be used on the system they had shipped with, as often they will contain software that is either licenced to that particular machine / model, or uses specific drivers that the hardware requires.

That said, I used a modified recovery image that can be found on the Internet Archive. From the looks if it, it appears a few files on the boot floppy image have been modified to allow instillation on non Acer machines.

Recovery Image – Archive.org

A Windows 95 version also exists, I guess this system was released between the two OS’s.

Boot up was pretty straightforward since this is a bootable CD, we are booted directly into the recovery utility where the system immediately begins its restore. This does require us to have initialized the disk in FDISK prior.

Initially the recovery seemed to be going well, and it immediately quit and dumped us to an A:\ prompt. This was a little odd, as normally recovery software informs the user the recovery process has completed and that they can restart their system. Still I rebooted, only to find it was stuck on an missing operating system error.
I decided to run the recovery again, thinking maybe it has crashed the first time but to no avail. IT would exit to the a:\ prompt after reaching 100% completion and upon reboot there would be no bootable OS.
I fired it up with the Windows 95 boot disk and check to see the status. Running a dir command on C:\ shows no results, and running FDISK showed no partitions, despite me creating and formatting to FAT32 prior to running the software.

It was defiantly writing files to the disk, as I could see the status icons in 86box light up for the hard drive, and the VHD file has grown to around 550MB meaning that files had defiantly been written to the hard disk (VHD image files can be set to dynamically expand as they are used).

This was bizarre and I wasn’t sure what was going on, was the recovery program nuking the partition table? Or maybe the virtual HDD wasn’t big enough and it was overwriting data.
Unlikely since I had created 4GB image, and FDISK defiantly detected the full amount, along with the BIOS.

The Solution

I decided to try an alternative method, there is a way to manually invoke the recovery program which might let us see whats going on.

To manually start the recovery process, point your command line to the TOOLS folder, then run GHOSTRO.EXE

To do this you must be in a command prompt that has been booted into the recovery image, this is located in the [BOOT] folder and is the Boot-1.44M.img file

You will need to manually locate the image file, this can be located in the IMAGES\PRELOAD.HDD location on the CD. Its worth noting the CD drive gets mounted to a different drive letter for the recovery only, it follows the standard Windows conventions after restore has completed.

The image field is password protected, the password being ACERMSU in block capitals. This was found in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, located in the floppy image file on the CD 9 located in the [BOOT] folder and is the Boot-1.44M.img file)

You are then given the option to select which drive or partition you wish to recover to

Recovery started again, looking similar to the original process, but this time we are told to press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot the system

Look! An OEM customized boot screen for Windows 98. It wasn’t uncommon to see these on Dell, Compaq or TIME PCs of the era.

Since we are running this on completely different hardware, we need to go through the hardware detection process which will take a while and will require a few reboots. Window s98 should have the drivers on the hard disk in CAB form so it should not prompt for the install CD-ROM.
It’s a good idea at this point to keep the 86box hardware as simple as possible, don’t install any sound/network cards or SCSI controller just yet.

Never seen this before, appears Windows 98 has to reconfigure itself. I guess this cleans up the old hardware that is no longer used.

Once we have the graphics card drivers installed, we can explore the install fully, An S3 ViRGE or Trio32 is recommended as 98 has built in drivers and support for hardware acceleration, plus you get basic 3D capability though for some serious gaming you will want to give it a Voodoo.

The included background wallpaper, which is an active desktop wallpaper.

The system properties box, showing the OEM logo and support information.

Despite the VM not having IrDA support, we still see the icons for it in the system tray and the My Computer.

A utility to change the modem region, but the system cannot find the included modem.

A full guide to the notebook computer, presented in HTML form. This acts as an user manual of sorts. It seems Acer neglected to update this for Windows 98 as much of the documentation refers to Windows 95 or NT.

A look at the notebook manager which is the program that interacts with the laptop BIOS, Which does not function on this VM sadly, we only have the screenshots from the manual to go by.

Intellisync

Seems to be a PIM (personal Information Manager) management tool which makes sense as this would have been marketed as a business computer. Developed by Pumatech

After loading we have this small window that lingers on the desktop

We first need to create a sync relationship, possibly with an external PDA or drive

The file transfer utility

The support screen, which just gives you the opportunity to register the software and view the readme

Lastly the synchronize tool to connect with another drive. I’m not sure if this is for a specific device that Acer might have bundled with this laptop or if its using a standard protocol to exchange data. This could be intended to sync files with a remote server, like a workplace domain for when the user needs to take their system home for the day. They can then later upload their files back to the server when they come in the next day
This was way before the days of cloud sync service like Dropbox or OneDrive
You could also use this to backup files to another hard drive, or an external Zip or Magneto optical disk (which 86Box supports)

Trying to backup the entire PC to a 100MB ZIP disk, I assumed it would only backup the documents folder.

AudioRack32

Some soft of MIDI/CD player and mixer that makes use of the soundcard built into the machine. Probably not much use with the SoundBlaster we have instead.
The DAT section has me curious, can this play digital audio tapes if one is connected?

MIDI files can be played, but you need to add them as part of a playlist first.

SafeOFF – some sort of utility that refuses to run, possibly an ACPI power standby utility.

And that’s it, very little bundled software with notable exceptions like Microsoft Works or Quicken which seems weird for a business laptop, perhaps they expected the user might already have access to Microsoft Office from their business or workplace?

There isn’t much included in the way of these or colour scheme, overall it’s a nice install of Windows 98 and not bloated like the Sony VAIO was.

Acer Extensa 700 Archive product page

South Park

Leave a reply

The game based on the popular TV show, came out very early in the shows life, along with a hit number 1 single

Story mode does not make for a good game, with the enemies being repetitive to the point of tediousness. The first level starts you off in your home town where you are attacked by deranged Turkey’s (who have the most horrible sound effect, and it’s horrendous if there’s 3 or more enemies present) and throughout the first three levels its just ongoing Turkey’s, with the occasional cow thrown in (only on the PC version, I’ve not seen the cow in the console versions on this level).

On the next stage you encounter Tank enemies which are larger Turkey’s that have the ability to spawn more turkeys that will attack. The tank’s have much more health than regular turkeys and will start to run into the beginning of the level when their health goes below 30%. If a tank manages to make it to the start point of a level, than another stage will need to be completed after you complete the level, where you have to kill the tank enemies that escaped, with a replenished health bar. You will need to do this before they destroy the town, of which depends on how many tanks had escaped. For this reason its a good idea to kill the tanks in the main game, since you are going to have to beat them regardless. What’s frustrating to me is they speed run back to the start of the level, meaning you have to chase them whilst firing, and causing you to backtrack. This makes the level much more tedious since you hare going through areas you have already passed.

The next levels don’t change much, replacing the turkeys with clones, robots, aliens and moving toys, however its mostly the same type of enemy throughout the level which become boring fast. Some of the later enemies becoming literal bullet sponges, taking 20-30 hits before they go down.

The multiplayer on the other hand is rather fun, playing as a regular FPS with a interesting selection of guns. The console versions let you play with two players, whilst the PC version supports LAN netplay. If there is one reason to play this game, its for the multiplayer mode.

The Nintendo 64 version has 17 different maps to choose from, all with a variety of weapons. The PC version has the most maps, with 26 in total This includes all the N64 maps, plus some PC exclusive maps. PlayStation has an alerted version of the multiplayer mode, discussed in its section.

Nintendo 64

The first release of the game, and was the best version of the game until the PC version, however it remains the most accessible. Multiplayer supports up to four players on one console with a range of multiplayer options, including deathmatch. This version also features a high score table and supports 16:9 aspect ratio and a ‘High-Res’ mode with the use of the expansion pack.

Downside to this version is the significant frame drops when there’s a lot of action on the screen, and the short draw distance being disguised as fog.

Below is running on Retroarch Mupen64plus with Angrylion RSP plugin, I do own a copy of the PAL version of the game, but my N64 is one of those models that only supports composite out (No RGB or even S-Video, way to go Nintendo)

PlayStation

Released a year later (1999) and used a revised soundtrack compared to the MIDI N64 version, the cutscenes are captured from the N64 version instead of being pre-rendered on a workstation like many other games of the era. Graphically its a downgrade compared to the N64 version, and the multiplayer only supports two players, known as head to head in this version.

The PlayStation version comes with a head to head mode that has 6 maps, some of which are modified from the Nintendo 64 version. DM1 is based off the Ravine level from the N64, but with some alterations like the removal of water. DM4 is based of the badlands level, DM5 off badlands 2 and DM6 is based off the Gym Class map. DM2 and DM3 look to be unique maps for the PlayStation version.

Captured on Duckstation emulator with bi-linear filtering and rendered at twice the original resolution, with GTE accuracy enabled

Windows

The definitive port of the game, with better graphics and CD audio. Also comes with a proper multiplayer mode that use the Gamespy client (now defunct) to organize games. However there are issues running this game on modern systems, as the game only seems to work on Windows 98/Me systems (95 untested but assumed to work) this could be down to DirectX/Glide support on modern systems.

Below is running on the PCem v17 emulator running Windows 98, emulating a Pentium Overdrive MMX 200Mhz, 3DFX Voodoo graphics, with a Aztech sound galaxy soundcard.

There is also a software rendering mode that renders the games graphics in just the CPU, ideal if you do not have a dedicated 3D accelerator or one that is unsupported. Unfortunately it gives PlayStation level graphics at a weird screen aspect ratio.

Cheats PC

These were hard to find, so I thought i’d put them here

Press the Esc button, select Options and move the mouse cursor to the lower left of the screen and then click, you can then enter the below cheats. Sometimes you may have to move the cursor so it goes off the screen before you can enter a cheat.

DESCRIPTION	CODE TO ENTER
All Weapons & Ammo	SWEET
Big head mode	EGOTRIP
Display framerate	FRAMERATE
Enable all cheats	BOBBYBIRD
God mode	BEEFCAKE

External Links

acclaim.com: South Park (archive.org)