Having Problems With Directx Games On Older Pc running Windows 98SE

[miladinoski 1]

Hi, I'm new to this forum as I am a Xisto forum user but unfortunately now it's down so I decided to ask the question overhere as this is a more geek oriented forum.

 

I have an older PII with 366 mHz, 64 MBs of RAM, a S3 Savage 3D graphics card with 8 MBs of memory, 2 hard disks one with 5 GB of space and the other with 30 GBs and a CD-ROM and another CD-RW which my parents bought for my brother back in 1998 and it has been upgraded two or three times from then. It runs Windows 98SE and has been last formatted the last year. I haven't used it for 6-7 months because the mouse didn't work for some reason (garbled characters in system.ini  ) and I thought I'd have to format it and was too lazy to do that so I left it out. 

 

The thing that bothers me is that DirectX games make the system unresponsive and I have topush the hard reset button every time  I could play games like MDK2, NFS4, SoF, DKII and Carmaggedon II, 2 years before perfectly without a single glitch on almost highest settings! I was wondering a lot why I they just stop responding just few secs after running them.

 

Running 'dxdiag' (without the quotes) in Start > Run, choosing the Display tab and clicking on 'Test Direct3D' shows the DirectX cube spinning for a really short time and then making the system not responding to my commands. 

 

I think that that's because I have DirectX 8.1 installed and my graphics card supports only up to 7.0a (on which the games above are playable) and I don't know how to remove DirectX without formatting the system (if possible).

 

What do you recommend me to do? I really want to play those games overthere because I have the originals of a few of them and my CD drive on this laptop doesn't work and can't switch it. Should I reformat or there is a tool to remove DirectX so I could hopefully install the 7th version which I have on several CDs. I have the drivers for everything but I'll have to hassle a lot of time to install all of them and to install several programs that I haven't installed on D: (where I have most of my apps lying). The good thing is that formatting will make the system boot faster.

 

Note: Unfortunately I don't have internet access on there because I can't setup a PPPoE connection because of technical reasons.

[wutske 0]

You know what they say, don't fix when it ain't broken.
You could try uninstalling directx using this ( http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) tool and then looking for an old DX7 installer and see if that fixes the problem.

[miladinoski 1]

You know what they say, don't fix when it ain't broken.

You could try uninstalling directx using this ( http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ ) tool and then looking for an old DX7 installer and see if that fixes the problem.

Oh thank you dude, a lot!

 

I'll try to use that and share my experiences here.

 

Also, do you know of any good abandonware games that play on Win98?

Edited December 28, 2008 by miladinoski (see edit history)

[miladinoski 1]

So, I downloaded the app. you told me to I installed it onto my old PC which alerted me that I can make the system unstable so I put that on mind that I should boot into safe mode the next time I run the system. After it removed the files it needed to, it said I needed to reboot, I rebooted and to go into 'Safe mode' I clicked on F8 constantly for the menu to show up, because if I booted into normal mode a BSoD appeared and after hitting any key the icons on the desktop didn't show up.

 

I had DX7 the install file on my system and after the quick install and again rebooting I started MDK2 which I hoped wouldn't hang the system but I was proved wrong

 

If you have any other suggestions except a format and clean install of DX7 (which eitherways I'm not sure that will help) please write them here and I'll try them.

 

Oh, btw, wutske thanks a lot!

[wutske 0]

Well, it is an old system ... maybe it's just dying . Using Prime95 you can stess the CPU and memory (altough I suggest SuperPI for the memory) to see if those are the problem.

[miladinoski 1]

Well, it is an old system ... maybe it's just dying .

Using Prime95 you can stess the CPU and memory (altough I suggest SuperPI for the memory) to see if those are the problem.

It is not dying I can assure you because I had that problem before 4 years (games couldn't be played) and suddenly 2 years ago they could and I was so extra happy back then, but a naughty virus was lying in a CD and I was not expecting it and had to format.

 

I don't know what I am doing wrong

[wutske 0]

Maybe you updated windows or your drivers 2 years ago. Updating windows might be a problem because I microsoft has pulled the supportplug for win98 a long time ago. Drivers should be available after registration at some dull driver-hosting website like driverguide.com

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

I think it's best to just ditch that old machine and just run Windows 98 in a virtual machine and play your games there. That or just play it on your new machine.xboxrulz

[miladinoski 1]

I think it's best to just ditch that old machine and just run Windows 98 in a virtual machine and play your games there. That or just play it on your new machine.

 

xboxrulz

OR do what I did and did solve some problems I mentioned earlier. I upgraded to Win2000 (which I should have done several years earlier ) and my system is more stable + my USB and Bluetooth dongles work + most recent softwares work with it as it's NT based (opposed to DOS based Win9x).

 

But some games can't be played because they are old and can only be played on Win9x systems. Ah well, at least I can connect to the internet from it now and some games are playable and it's put to use again

Edited January 14, 2009 by miladinoski (see edit history)