looks like Parhelia's a no-no for me!

[Wombat]

Easy there KvH, maybe he enjoys sticking with a single-processor OS and prefers to waste money on processor features he won't use

[BuddMan]

Originally posted by Wombat
And Win95 games?

Well, I haven't had any probs running Win95 games in XP with my Rage Pro. Dunno about 2000 though.

[Joel]

Here's the article I was talking about.



Joel

[Wombat]

I guess you missed the part where I said Soul Reaver and Mission Control won't run?

[BuddMan]

Oh well. At least ATI is still writing Windows ME drivers.

[rubank]

There is more to it than games.
I have perfectly functional apps that WILL NOT run in XP, one of which is PCAnywhere 9.
If you have good apps like this, which you actually use, and don´t want to waste money on upgrades then you would be limited to standard VGA in tose apps - and how fun is that.
(If the darn P supports/works in this mode)

So there are valid reasons even beyond gaming for win9x support.

(I wonder how many times I have pointed this out )

rubank

[Wienerschnitzl]

hi,

some people here are missing the whole point imho.
It is not the question "does this game run on W2K or not?"
If anyone wants W98 so what ?
Imho he can just use it.
Or next time you want to tell him which car he has to drive ?
I´m not getting it.

btw, until now, Matrox always supported ecery OS you can think of, even 3.11 until last year i guess.
For the G400 there was a OS/2-driver released in Jan2002
They promised at the release of the Parhelia128 beta W98-drivers in about 8 weeks.

[Zanna]

Astonishing !!!

I'm very pleased to acquire that Matrox does not want to make me happy, I really want to buy Parhelia, but now, due to the lack of w98se support, I can say "good bye" to the idea !!

I will use, in the future, my old G400MAX

Only whit this card I have all the support I need for the O.S.es I want to run.

I can't understand the reason to sell a card with a poor set of compatibility, if Matrox want to sell it in quantity.

The customers that does not want to buy a new O.S. (the Parhelia card is expensive without this, figure out if you must buy a new O.S. too...) inevitably will remain with an older card (as me) or buy a less expensive or more compatible card from another company.

It's a right way of doing business?

Are Matrox guys from this planet or from another?

An astonished Matrox User.

[Ribbit]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Ribbit, you have an MP motherboard, 512mb of RAM, a 73GB Atlas hdd and SCSI, and you don't see any advantages to w2k over 98? With that system, your excuses just don't add up.

As I've said before, I only have Windows for gaming. If I was using it for anything 'productive' you'd be right - I'd have much less excuse. The SCSI disk is dedicated entirely to Linux (where I do my work and everything else except gaming). So what does Win2k give me over Win98?

- SMP support. Well I only have one CPU at the moment anyway. But even if I had two, I'm only aware of three games which can make use of SMP: Falcon 4, Quake 3-based games (which for me means Alice), and iL-2 Sturmovik. While I do own the first two and plan to get iL-2, anecdotal evidence suggests that none of these see anything like a significant performance increase with a second processor. And there is nothing I'd be doing in the background while playing either. So SMP support under Windows doesn't do anything much for me.

- Better memory management. How would this manifest itself? Would I see less swapping? (Haven't seen any yet anyway.) I don't know, but I don't have any issues under Win98. (I'm aware of the 512MB Vcache thing, but that's easily fixed.)

- NTFS. Yes, FAT32 isn't exactly wonderful. But the filesystem doesn't have to work that hard in my case - it just has to do a lot of reading and write the odd save game file. I don't mind defragging after installing a new program, my disk defrags pretty quickly anyway (I'll probably change my tune once it starts to really fill up )

- Stability. Well the only issues I've had are Falcon 4 occasionally crashing to the desktop (as it is known to do under Win98 and Win2k) and CMR2 occasionally locking the machine up hard (which I've seen on other machines). In either case, I doubt Win2k could save my game from crashing and keep it going anyway.

- APIC support. My IRQs are very nicely distributed, thank you, and if I add any other devices (the only things I can possibly think of are Firewire and/or a video capture card), I wouldn't be using them under Windows anyway.

I might have had one or two other reasons, but I've forgotten them now (feel free to help)

For the above I trade memory (Win98 min. req. 16MB, Win2K Pro = 128MB), Disk space (Win98 = 120MB, mine's using 145MB + swap + game installations, Win2K = 1GB), and processor (Win98 = 486/66, Win2K = P133). (Sure, I've got all three to spare, but that doesn't mean I should waste them.) Plus whatever Win2K costs. Plus the extra boot-up time. Plus those annoying fade-in menus and the fact that they've changed the Control Panel again so I can't find anything in it.

Again, all of the above reasons are perfectly good reasons to upgrade if you need them. But since I only use Windows for (light) gaming, none of them are really beneficial or compelling to me. If I used Windows for Real Work, I'd already be running 2K. If Win98 becomes a horrible, slow, unstable mess which can't stay up for half an hour, I'll upgrade. If games start coming out which I want to play but which need Win2K, I'll upgrade. Until then, I have no good reason (and Parhelia in its present state is not reason enough).

[Pace]

Or next time you want to tell him which car he has to drive

Continuing your analogy, I'd be telling them not to buy a 10ton artic if you're going to pull it with a '98 Ford Fiesta. Get a '00 Pacey Deluxe Truck-o for that

rubank: Do you know if PCA9 will run on Win2k?

P.

[rubank]

Pace,
no I don´t know that. It´s not an option though, I don´t have w2k. I have, and use, 98se and XP and I don´t plan on giving M$ more $ any time soon.

rubank

[WyWyWyWy]

- SMP support. Well I only have one CPU at the moment anyway. But even if I had two, I'm only aware of three games which can make use of SMP: Falcon 4, Quake 3-based games (which for me means Alice), and iL-2 Sturmovik. While I do own the first two and plan to get iL-2, anecdotal evidence suggests that none of these see anything like a significant performance increase with a second processor. And there is nothing I'd be doing in the background while playing either. So SMP support under Windows doesn't do anything much for me.


Even though games are not making use of it directly, they do a lot of kernel system calls which do make use of SMP.


- Better memory management. How would this manifest itself? Would I see less swapping? (Haven't seen any yet anyway.) I don't know, but I don't have any issues under Win98. (I'm aware of the 512MB Vcache thing, but that's easily fixed.)


No swap!? Are you sure on this.
Windows 9x doesn't handle high amount of memory nicely.


- NTFS. Yes, FAT32 isn't exactly wonderful. But the filesystem doesn't have to work that hard in my case - it just has to do a lot of reading and write the odd save game file. I don't mind defragging after installing a new program, my disk defrags pretty quickly anyway (I'll probably change my tune once it starts to really fill up )


You are right. And especially you are running Linux as your primary productive platform, you will see better compatibility with FAT32 than NTFS. Raw performance wise FAT32 is faster too, though it lacks some permission settings.


- Stability. Well the only issues I've had are Falcon 4 occasionally crashing to the desktop (as it is known to do under Win98 and Win2k) and CMR2 occasionally locking the machine up hard (which I've seen on other machines). In either case, I doubt Win2k could save my game from crashing and keep it going anyway.


Doesn't your explorer.exe crash? Okay may be your Win98 is still very clean right now, but two months later it won't be the same.


- APIC support. My IRQs are very nicely distributed, thank you, and if I add any other devices (the only things I can possibly think of are Firewire and/or a video capture card), I wouldn't be using them under Windows anyway.


Good job in distributing IRQs.


I might have had one or two other reasons, but I've forgotten them now (feel free to help)


Money?


For the above I trade memory (Win98 min. req. 16MB, Win2K Pro = 128MB), Disk space (Win98 = 120MB, mine's using 145MB + swap + game installations, Win2K = 1GB), and processor (Win98 = 486/66, Win2K = P133). (Sure, I've got all three to spare, but that doesn't mean I should waste them.) Plus whatever Win2K costs. Plus the extra boot-up time. Plus those annoying fade-in menus and the fact that they've changed the Control Panel again so I can't find anything in it.

Again, all of the above reasons are perfectly good reasons to upgrade if you need them. But since I only use Windows for (light) gaming, none of them are really beneficial or compelling to me. If I used Windows for Real Work, I'd already be running 2K. If Win98 becomes a horrible, slow, unstable mess which can't stay up for half an hour, I'll upgrade. If games start coming out which I want to play but which need Win2K, I'll upgrade. Until then, I have no good reason (and Parhelia in its present state is not reason enough).

And if you think Win98 has a good performance, Win2k will be even better on your given hardware. You shouldn't think in "trading" memory and processor, Win2K is "making better use" of them (however, disk space wise, you are right). And oh Win2k boots faster than Win98 too.

Seriously, give it a go.

[Marshmallowman]

get a pci video card for dual booting to win98.

I can't believe anyone with a MP board would be running win98....tell the truth, why would you be running win98 unless you have old hardware and less than 256 of memory


install linux when matrox releases linux drivers and then run your old windows games using wine...


10c OS running $1000 hardware...I've seen it all now.

[Strahd]

Originally posted by KvHagedorn
Ribbit, you have an MP motherboard, 512mb of RAM, a 73GB Atlas hdd and SCSI, and you don't see any advantages to w2k over 98? With that system, your excuses just don't add up. I got W2kSP2 because I didn't want XP (and may never get another MS OS if their attitude remains as it is.) but I'm very glad I got W2k.. it was the easiest OS I've ever set up, does everything 98 did (have found very few programs it didn't like) and is far more stable. The extra features may not seem useful at first, but you will begin to appreciate them very quickly. I thought I would be switching back to 98 occasionally, but I really have not had to bother. I could see it if there were some things I needed to do in DOS, but I don't really need that. Microsoft did an excellent job on this one, and I intend to keep using it as long as I can.

Or until a video card manufacturer decides it won't write drivers and therefore forces you to change.

Then maybe you'll see where Ribbitt is coming from.

[Wienerschnitzl]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by WyWyWyWy

Doesn't your explorer.exe crash? Okay may be your Win98 is still very clean right now, but two months later it won't be the same.

Here there´s Win98SE since almost 2 years installed. No explorer.exe crashes - fast and stable. Newer isn´t always better:
W95 crashes all the time - get Win98, very stable
Win98 has stability Problems, upgrade to Win98SE
Win98SE is so unstable, upgrade to W2000/XP, and the crashes are gone
W2000/XP has radom crashes, upgrade to W2002/XP2
....
to be continued


And if you think Win98 has a good performance, Win2k will be even better on your given hardware. You shouldn't think in "trading" memory and processor, Win2K is "making better use" of them (however, disk space wise, you are right). And oh Win2k boots faster than Win98 too.

That is NOT true.
Here, i have Win98SE and Win2000 Dual-Boot.
UT and NWN (the only Games i play at the moment) are noticable faster on Win98SE.
Boottime:
Win98SE: ~15 to 20 seconds
Win2000: more than one minute