98lite

[cobelli]

98 lite.
A great piece of software that lets you stip out all the crap from windows 98 that is not needed in an arcade pc. They have a trial version, but it doesn't let you do very much. I used it way back to make a 98 distro that could boot off a cdrom. It made 98 small enough to load onto a ramdisk! Pretty sweet. I am going to see if I can find that disk I made if someone wants to email me about it. If you want to buy the software, they let you "choose" its worth. Therefore you can choose to pay anything from $25 to $60. http://www.litepc.com/98lite.html Check it out.
-Cobelli

[cobelli]

I can't find the original installation, however I did find my disk. The enitre 98 installation is 53 mb!! Still nothing compared to dos, but for those of you that really need windows, it's a nice solution.
-Cobelli

[paigeoliver]

What is more fun is stripping down Windows 95. You can get it incredibly small. I believe I got the install on my old laptop down to 10 MB at one point.

[cobelli]

Very true, but besides size, speed and compatibility are important too. I found it ran faster than 95 (all though, in its sleekest form, it has you swap the 98 explorer with 95's).
- Cobelli

[Howard_Casto]

I wouldn't reccomend 95 or 98lite.  Directx has abandonded 95 as a supported os.  98 lite doesn't handle all directx calls properly, particularly the newer versions of dx.  In todays standards 98se is microscopic, just stick to it.  

[DarkKobold]

I've had nothing but good experience with 98lite. Probably, as howard said, not good for Mame Cabinets, but very good for hackable computers, such as the I-Opener, 3com Audrey, or Gateway connected touchpad. Depending on your application, you may need to get down to less then 100 megs for a win98 install.

[Sasquatch!]

I wouldn't reccomend 95 or 98lite.  Directx has abandonded 95 as a supported os.  98 lite doesn't handle all directx calls properly, particularly the newer versions of dx.  In todays standards 98se is microscopic, just stick to it.  

Although MS ain't gonna be updating 98SE for that much longer, are they?

[Howard_Casto]

Right, it'll probably be dropped with longhorn

[cobelli]

Yup. They've already dropped 95 and I think 98 gold. SE is the next logical step. Microsofts official stance is they only support 3 os at once. I say ditch ME and leave 98 in there for a few more years. An interesting fact: Whistler (the codename for xp) is a ski mountain and longhorn is a bar at the bottom of it!
- Cobelli

[Analog-X]

Yup. They've already dropped 95 and I think 98 gold. SE is the next logical step. Microsofts official stance is they only support 3 os at once. I say ditch ME and leave 98 in there for a few more years. An interesting fact: Whistler (the codename for xp) is a ski mountain and longhorn is a bar at the bottom of it!
- Cobelli

Hi Cobelli

I bought 98Lite Last year and have used it in many situations where I need a fast 98 System that was not bloated with all other MS stuff.
 
Anyways, many times before I attempted to run Win98Lite from a CD-ROM and using Ram-Disk without any success.  Would you have any documentation on how this is done?
 

(Start of RANT!!)
Now as far as Microsoft Dropping OS/S.
 
I have a link about Microsoft Going after a Small Company whos licencing info was off on about 8% of their computers and all the hell they went through which convinced the owner of the company to go completly non-microsoft and so they switched to Linux.
 
Which brings me back to what you said about MS Supporting 3 OS's at a time.  The Article touches on that topic, as one of the annoyances.  The Owner of the companys says he's saving money every year by not having to upgrade OS's and losing support on previous os.
 
For home user when an OS support drops its not that big of a deal you either stick with the old one or upgrade.
 
A large company has the added bonus of hundreds of computers that would need to be upgraded which is a lot of work and cant realy stick with an obsolete OS since business demands upgrades be made...sometimes the customers you deal with upgrade their os/software so you have no choice but to follow.
(END OF RANT)
 

[SpAwN]

I did a 98lite install on my computer, it runs and boots really fast. I'm using advmame and everything works great.

BUT its been a pain trying to get Daphne to run. I'm going to format and install regular win98se and see if I can get Daphne to run correctly.

[rampy]

That ernie ball story was pretty good (I read it too Analog-x)

I used to like ernie ball skinny top fat bottoms back in they day when played guitar in bad grunge bands (for lack of a better description)

But I digress... although technically HC is right (booo hisss) I've used 98lite in my cabinet (and other applications) and loved it and didn't have any problems (who needs the latest directX anyways)

I liked the control 98lite gave me over my install.  I don't need a webbrowser on my arcade machine (nor the overhead of integrated IE)... and thre's a bunch of other crap... I liked the snappy feel of Windows 98SE with a 95 desktop and no IE on older hardware so that i could maximize performance out of what I got...  I actually left that particular machine in DOS mode for just that reason...

When I upgraded however, to an AMD XP1700 I chose XP as my OS, partially because some of the stuff I wanted to use either performed better in XP (daphne) or was XP only....  I then proceeded to tweak the hell out of the services thanks to the black vipers guide (seeing a pattern here?)

*shrug*  Just like anything else stuff has it's application and "sweet spot"... that reminds me... I should put 98lite micro  on my craptop =P

Rampy

[cobelli]

It was a while back, so I am struggling to remember, but I think this is how I made a bootable 98.

First off, and most importantly, the boot sequence. The cd has to be bootable or nothing will work. In nero, anyway, it asks for a floppy or floppy image to create the boot image from. Here's what I included on that floppy.
Basic dos stuff (can be created by going to format a drive and selecting like creat system disk)
Xcopy
xmsdsk
oakcdrom.sys

Then, here is the autoexec.bat that makes all the magic happen:
MSCDEX.EXE  /D:CD001 /L:D
rem a:\xmsdsk 64000 c: /y
copy a:\command.com c:
rem a:\xcopy d:\win\*.* c:\ /s /e
path=c:\;c:\windows\command;c:\windows;c:\windows\system
c:\windows\
win.com


Squashed down 98 as small as it would go, then booted in dos and duplicated all of windows into a folder. That folder then gets burned onto the cd as win.

I know that was rushed, but I was in a hurry. If you need more help, let me know. I'd be glad to upload the bootdisk to you.

- Cobelli

Hi Cobelli

I bought 98Lite Last year and have used it in many situations where I need a fast 98 System that was not bloated with all other MS stuff.
 
Anyways, many times before I attempted to run Win98Lite from a CD-ROM and using Ram-Disk without any success.  Would you have any documentation on how this is done?
 

(Start of RANT!!)
Now as far as Microsoft Dropping OS/S.
 
I have a link about Microsoft Going after a Small Company whos licencing info was off on about 8% of their computers and all the hell they went through which convinced the owner of the company to go completly non-microsoft and so they switched to Linux.
 
Which brings me back to what you said about MS Supporting 3 OS's at a time.  The Article touches on that topic, as one of the annoyances.  The Owner of the companys says he's saving money every year by not having to upgrade OS's and losing support on previous os.
 
For home user when an OS support drops its not that big of a deal you either stick with the old one or upgrade.
 
A large company has the added bonus of hundreds of computers that would need to be upgraded which is a lot of work and cant realy stick with an obsolete OS since business demands upgrades be made...sometimes the customers you deal with upgrade their os/software so you have no choice but to follow.
(END OF RANT)
 

[Chris]

You only really need the latest DirectX if you are doing non-MAME stuff.  If you have a pure MAME cabinet with no USB devices, you might as well run DOS rather than any Lite version of Windows.  (Howard, your objection is pre-noted.  )

--Chris

[Analog-X]

No thats good enough information I will give it a shot.

 But just a thought what about the MBR (Master Boot Record) doesnt windows use it for certain things like the swap file?

And what if I were to boot this special CD-ROM on a Windows 2000 Machine it wouldnt harm the boot sector in anyway?

I know that was rushed, but I was in a hurry. If you need more help, let me know. I'd be glad to upload the bootdisk to you.

- Cobelli

[Lilwolf]

1) If you have a bootable Win98lite CD... don't forget to purchase one per cd you burn... I believe that is the legal method.....  <cough>

2) Why not move to Linux instead?  Linux has been bootable from CD for a LONG time.  There are also boot setups out there that you can download and just use....  And it doesn't require you to have a ramdisk at all.... It will create temp files on a local drive if you have them... or just not cash the crap out to disk.... See Linux has an amazing memory strat that says... If we have 200mg of ram.  Nobodys asking for more... Then we will NOT send our OS out to a ramdisk.... I don't know why MS hasn't tried this yet.

[cobelli]

It shouldnt' touch the boot sector on the hard drive. I originally designed it to run without a hard drive in the machine, so it is entirely contained in the ramdrive. One issue, though, is that Win 98 NEEDS the drive to be c:\ in order to boot off it. Therefore, the ramdisk is created as the c drive. I don't know how it will treat your 2000 drive. It won't hurt it, but it may not mount it depending on the size / file system.

- Cobelli

No thats good enough information I will give it a shot.

 But just a thought what about the MBR (Master Boot Record) doesnt windows use it for certain things like the swap file?

And what if I were to boot this special CD-ROM on a Windows 2000 Machine it wouldnt harm the boot sector in anyway?

I know that was rushed, but I was in a hurry. If you need more help, let me know. I'd be glad to upload the bootdisk to you.

- Cobelli

[Megaweapon]

98 lite doesn't handle all directx calls properly, particularly the newer versions of dx.

Got a source for that?  I use 98lite as my primary OS and most of what I do is gaming of the FPS variety.  No issues, as far as I can tell.

[Analog-X]

I will try Linux One of these days, have install and played with many OS/s in the past 20 years but Linux is the only one I havent tried.
 
I have tried the Knoppix Linux Boot CD and its awesome it has worked for me on many machines, like Laptops / Desktops.
 
I wish I could setup a permanent installation exactly like the Knoppix CD with all the bells and whistles.

[Howard_Casto]

98 lite doesn't handle all directx calls properly, particularly the newer versions of dx.

Got a source for that?  I use 98lite as my primary OS and most of what I do is gaming of the FPS variety.  No issues, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, me... I've tried it on several systems, and it always fails directx testing unless it's a super old version of dx or you don't use all of the lite tweaks (ie removing the core for a 95 one)  but to it's credit it "half works".  Personally i'd rather have a system that I don't have to worry if the app will run on, in lue of a few extra megs of storage space.  

[DarkKobold]

I agree with howard on everything but one point -

When you install win98lite, you also get a marginal performance boost. If your system is from the dawn of time (aka 5 years or older) then running 98lite/95core is the BEST option, IMHO.

[Howard_Casto]

Actually (better write this down guys you'll NEVER hear this again) if your system is that old DOS might be the best bet for a mame cab.  

Afterall, the benefits of using windows over dos are better memory managment, usb support, directx enabled games, more apps, better multimedia support and a more stable system.  When you put on 98lite and replace the core with the 95 core, you pretty much nullify all of those benefits.  And since dos STILL has a smaller memory footprint, I'd say go for dos.  

Ouch!  I think my skin is burning.  Ok time to cleanse myself of the devil dos.  

[Chris]

Actually (better write this down guys you'll NEVER hear this again) if your system is that old DOS might be the best bet for a mame cab.  

* faints *

Afterall, the benefits of using windows over dos are better memory managment,

Specifically, the ability to use more than 256MB of RAM.  Memory efficiency can be improved by using QEMM as your memory manager (if you can find it), but even QEMM can't get you past the 256 MB limit.

usb support,

Someone here (yeah, I know, probably me) needs to try out those DOS USB drivers...

directx enabled games, more apps, better multimedia support

This is the biggest argument not to use DOS.  If you plan on running anything other than MAME, old DOS games, or my jukebox, you need Windows.

and a more stable system.

This is where Howard and I clash.  When my cabinet ran DOS, it never crashed, not once.  I do get occasional crashes in Windows.  DOS itself just doesn't crash, although applications running in DOS may crash, and since DOS is single-tasking by itself, an application crash means a system crash.

Ouch!  I think my skin is burning.  Ok time to cleanse myself of the devil dos.  

--Chris

[SirPeale]

usb support,

Someone here (yeah, I know, probably me) needs to try out those DOS USB drivers...

I did.  However, without the corresponding device drivers, it's not gonna work.

[Steve Kaz]

So you guys would reccommend stripping some items from Win98se or just leave it as is?  It doesn't sound like going with 98lite is a good option...

[DarkKobold]

Actually (better write this down guys you'll NEVER hear this again) if your system is that old DOS might be the best bet for a mame cab.