How significant was the transition from Windows 98 to Windows XP for gaming? In what ways did it shape PC gaming, and do you have any personal experiences from upgrading that stand out?
it was significant for your hardware.xp needed too many resources to run well.the same thing running on 98/me ran like crap on xp.i tried xp and it ran like shit, stayed with me (because me is like 98 but with xp qol) and didn't "upgrade" to xp until i had a beefy pc.
I moved from W98 to XP only in 2004 or 2005. I don't remember exactly why I did that, but I don't think it had anything to do with games — more likely it was due to some hardware issues.Speaking of games, by the mid-00s I lost interest in new stuff, but until that time nearly all games worked absolutely fine on W98, also there still were no issues with GPU drivers.
>>12016995It was like bags of sand, being cut from your hot air balloon. You could fly higher.
>>12016995>>12017013like this poster said, for many an upgrade to XP meant a huge hardware upgradefor me it was a big deal to play Diablo 2 and not stare at the loading screen for one eternity (right before Duriel killed my necromancer before my PC let me move)
Devs stopped making DOS shit, default theme looked like ass outside of really good looking desktop background photos that are still really good looking to this day. Gaming seemed to be a good bit smoother and better looking.
It wasnt really different at first since 98 and xp would both be running directX 8, and sound card and video card manufacturers supported both OS. Win 98 had a much wider install base early on? So something like diablo 2 and deus ex were more or less the same on either OS, even up to half life 2 and early WoW the games were win 98 ready. Win98 eventually got DX9 support but gpu manufacturers simply stopping making drivers for it, and a limit of 512mb system ram eventually affected gaming (there were tricks to go to 1gb ram on win 98 but it was unstable, and older ram on an older motherboard).
>>12017464>limit of 512mbwin 98 supports more than 1gb without patches. many recommend to not go over 512mb though. but the os has no inherent limit.period hardware, though, did not go past 1gb. hell, many high end motherboards had only 3 slots of ram, maxing out at 768mb.i own an asus p3b-f which has 4 slots and a maximum of 1gb with 4 256mb modules, sadly i don't have that much ram and this mobo is picky.by the time hardware was able ro go past 1gb of ram, win 2000 and xp were around and mature enough to daily drive.
>>12016995I dual-booted W98SE and XPeverything ran slower under XP on my hardware & nvidia card until vendors started taking NT drivers seriously (the nvidia drivers eventually caught up, at least)anyways, XP was thrash and made me move to desktop linux
>>12017013>>12017214I had a friend with an old shitty machine and he ran 2000 instead of XP because of thatI can’t remember exactly why he didn’t just stay on 98 but I guess he wanted to use some NT only software or something
>>12017501Windows 2000 was extremely stable (more than Windows XP, and waaaay more than 98), was just as capable as XP for gaming, while being much lighter, especially post-SP2. Of course it lacked some consumer-oriented features, but you could do without most of them.
My extarnal sound card just died and the internal will just break your jackIt's never been more over for my retro setup my dear bipocs
>>12016995Your 98 machine either had no graphics card or some weird voodoo/3dfx shit that was irrelevant in 2 years.Your XP machine had an nvidia 5200fx or equivalent. If you built your XP machine before Doom 3 came out you wasted your money and had to upgrade a bunch of shit or buy a new one, because Doom 3 set the standard for CPU/GPU requirements after it came out. Having a graphics card seemed less important on 98 unless you were really into Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament, as you could run the entire dos library and there were software rendered 3D dos games well into 1997.People don't discuss it, but a lot of people stuck with their 80s 8-bit and 16-bit PCs all the way until Windows ME/2000/XP kicked off a wave of cheap desktop computers and the few remaining software and utilities for all the old non-PC computers became completely non-existent in the late 90s. Amiga guys were still convinced it might somehow bounce back until Windows 95 came out. Until the internet became mainstream amongst the upper middle class in the late 90s, a lot of people thought Windows = Work, and their were fine with their ancient shit because "it still has games, a word processor, and hooks up to a printer, why do I need Windows?" Internet going mainstream and every company suddenly having a website and stuff being sold over the internet instantly created demand for those computers that wasn't there before. 98 got SOME of this, but it really took hold in full swing around 2000 when it became the norm that you had a Windows 2000/XP machine in your house or you were a chud/luddite/old man with a commodore. You'll find all kinds of references to boomers with outdated 286s and commodores and stuff in the late 90s/early 2000s internet humor space like webcomics etc.
>>12018243https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpMvS1Q1sos>You're using a 286? Don't make me laugh.>Your window boots up in, what, a day and a half?
>>12018243The Amiga enthusiasts hanging on into the 21st century using powerpc chipsets was pretty weird.
>>12016995You've asked this before, bot-kun.
>>12016995I was on Windows 2000, since I skipped over 98 and Me. I remember there was some excitement in the followup to 2000 being the next major OS upgrade that I paid the $10USD to be on the XP preview program. I still preferred 2000, but XP wasn't bad in the pre-release cycle, however upon the actual release there was pushback, even from myself, that the registration/activation requires a phone call. People didn't like it at first, but eventually it became accepted; such is the way with Microsoft products: go forward with an unpopular policy then wait out the backlash so people will learn to love it. Microsoft tries to find that point which has not been reached to most, but I quit out after 7 since I don't need telemetry nor ads on my devices, but most other people like ads on their OS. XP was significant as the first time I noticed this behavior where the public accepts what I deem is "worse" but loves it more, as I stuck with 2000 until I had to go to XP64 for newer hardware.
>>12018514>powerpcshitmiga fags would never gonna make it.
>>12016995Initially XP was worse. Worse support for dedicated sound hardware, really bad early GPU drivers, everything needed at least twice as much RAM, and so on.But as drivers got better and XP got patches, it improved a lot. SP2, DX9, PCIe graphics cards, built-in Wifi management, USB plug-n-play that actually worked, functional multitasking, much improved SMB file and printer sharing.The biggest problem with gaming on XP is that DRM got so so much worse. Where most Windows 9x games relied on basic stuff like read errors, XP really cranked things up by allowing copy-protection that essentially functioned as rootkits, and later on there was internet-based DRM like Securom Limited Lifetime Activations.
>>12018514Modern Amigas are hilarious as they're insanely expensive, yet underpowered and with an OS that doesn't run jackshit. At least with Mac you can argue it can run Adobe and other graphic design and AV shit.
>>1201701398's RAM limitations were disgusting and if you had more 256MB RAM or more you basically needed to run XP or 2000.
>>12019530fake news. read >>12017486
>>12019530Wut? Windows 98 was 100% fine running up to 512 MB, and in fact that amount of RAM would've been considered obscene during its heyday. 128 MB was much more appropriate and would've been enough for just about anything you'd want to run on it.
>>12016995XP heralded the end of Microsoft's single decent era. Ridiculous Fisher-Price toy aesthetics, telemetry and bloat. Took multiple security packs to get it working somewhat decently. Windows was never the same again after the 90s.
>>12019635XP SP3 is way more stable than 98SE
>>12019645It took three service packs to get to the stability level that it should have been out of the box? A new OS being more stable than an old one should be a given.
>>12016995how did you get steam working?
>>12019667XP was already more stable than 98 from its inception just due to it using the NT framework. That doesn't mean it was bug-free, though, and it did have compatibility issues due to certain manufacturers dragging their feet in regards to writing proper drivers, but that's not the fault of the OS itself. In any case, by SP2 most of its bugs were fixed and the driver support was fully realized, and it was at that point that there was no reason to stick with Windows 98 unless you were still using a Pentium III or older.
>>12019842Vista was already more stable than XP from its inception. That doesn't mean it was bug-free, though, and it did have compatibility issues due to certain manufacturers dragging their feet in regards to writing proper drivers, but that's not the fault of the OS itself. In any case, by SP2 most of its bugs were fixed and the driver support was fully realized, and it was at that point that there was no reason to stick with Windows XP unless you were still using a Pentium 4 or older.
>>12019848Yeah? With the possible exception of the first line, none of that is inaccurate. Vista's biggest problem was its system requirements were way more than what most PCs that came installed with it during it's launch could handle, and the drivers were indeed an issue.Also, are we forgetting that Windows 98 had a first release, which was quite buggy and unstable and it took the Second Edition to fix it?
>>12019886nta but the problem with xp was because it used nt as a base when the majority of the software was written and optimized for 9x.programs ran like shit if at all under xp and the systems requirements and the fact that most consumer pc's sold at the time had the bare minimum to run it didn't help either.it was the exact same situation except that in the case of vista, most programs just worked or needed to be run as admin to work.yet, people call xp the second coming of christ for some reason.98se worked out of the box and what you could call jank was just inherent of computers at the time.xp took years to get things right, sp2 at the very least.
>>12019913>yet, people call xp the second coming of christ for some reason.Millennial nostalgia. Zoomers do the same with Windows 7. The 1990s were the only time Microsoft had their shit together, it didn't last long.
>>12019913>Second Edition worked out of the box
It was huge.It made everything more straight forward, accessible and fun to use.
>>12019928guess what, the still buggy mess that is xp sp1 would be the equivalent to 98se.and i'm not counting if you had home edition, which was another point of failure.one that vista and even 7 didn't avoid.
>>12019056I agree. The PowerPC requirement is so fucking weird.The absolute weirdest design choices of a closed source OS with retardedly niche hardware.The only good Amiga is an emulated one. Just get a MisterPi or actual Pi 5 with VGA hat, slap it into a 3D printed wedge case and call it a day.Amiga Game Selector kicks ass too, even if you're still a Windows retard these days with WinUAE, and Amiberry is great.Real hardware is just retarded nowadays.
>>12019313This is true too. Even a fucking i7 Mac can run Amiberry and other Amiga emulators with JIT compilation.The weird shitty AmigaOS look basically wants to be MacOS so badly but ends up feeling like some kind of shitty Linux distro akin to like Puppy Linux but for all the worst reasons.
>>12019848>>12019842What kind of faggot retarded bot bullshit is this?
>>12019943>implying i care about shitmigait was just a stepping stone for real, x86 pc gaming.
>>12019950looks more like mockery than a bot
>>12019951I'm not saying you care about it. The only good thing about Amiga were the games and art and music in its middle life span.Past that it sucks.
>>12019970and not even for that.all shitmiga games worth playing got ported to x86.
>>12020031Whatever faggot, there are decent standalone Amiga games that aren't ports either.Get fucked.
>>12020045Not him, but can you name some? I want to get into Amiga gaming.
>>12017780I had a friend that convinced me to use win 2000 even though I didn't really have a reason (pirated obviously) so glad to know he knew what he was talking about
>>12016995I had a 98 2nd edition for a few years. My older brother had winamp setup through a sick diy sound system with a subwoofer. Before kazaa there was a p2p network called audiogalaxy(right after Napster fell) and we downloaded as much mp3s as our hdd could handle(500mb), burn CDs, delete mp3s, download new ones, rinse and repeat. I remember playing daggerfall and I had sonic CD for it plus zsnes and a few of those "500 games on 1cd!" Discs. Then we got a badass xp home edition with an audigy sound setup and a subscription to Rhapsody. Rhapsody was spotify, but in the early 2000s. No joke, it was legit for the time. I miss it and the pop up interesting facts about the song/band you're currently listening to kinda like the original "did you know" but less cringy. As for gaming, I didn't notice much as I used zsnes and only had warcraft 2 and AOE at the time idk what happened to my sonic CD copy. I downloaded a lot of demos from CNET/download.com at first and then kazaa hit the scene and I downloaded a few games, but our hdd wasn't much bigger so I couldn't download much. I thinking had halo for a minute then dues ex and Morrowind. I remember being very disinterested on Morrowind as a 12 year old, but I loved daggerfall as a younger kid, even though I don't think I ever made it out of the privateers hold. I distinctly remember playing gish and line rider and going to tekzoned.net and playing spank the monkey.
>>12016995>A lot of games were made for DOS.>Win95 was mostly a screen on top of DOS, so this worked fine usually.>Took more effort in Win98, sometimes booting out to DOS, but could run.>Games start to get made for Win98 too.>Windows 2000 comes out.>Good OS, but designed for businesses first so it can't run a lot of old games.>ME comes out and attempts to rectify that, but ME was a piece of shit.>Finally after a few years XP hits the shelves, still has compatibility issues with 98 games but at least there's a compatibility mode that allows them to install and run.It was a pretty big transition but things stayed stable on WinXP for a long time. Windows Vista came out, attempted to get people to switch by forcing a new version of direct X, but very few devs worked to make games for it. Windows 7 came out and was stable enough to not immediately frustrate people and had comparability for older platforms, but the Aero desktop still caused some issues. Overall, things were good because Windows 8 got ignored until Win10 came out.I remember using XP well until 2013 or so until Win7 finally supplanted it for me, it was pretty great. In comparison to Win98, the platform felt more stable with less blue screens and driver failures than previous.
>>120177802000 was great for stability but not so great for gaming. It lacked compatibility features that WinXP got later. I remember at the time numerous games made for DOS or 95 had no way to run on it while XP did have a mode for them to launch.Trying to play C&C Gold or X-COM was out of the question. Sim Tower wouldn't work. It took a few years for patches to be made for some of these games to rectify this, but by that time XP was already coming out.
>>120203682000 actually does have the compatibility modes it just doesn't get enabled unless you tweak the registry. It also received updates later on to improve game compatibility.
>>12020437Yeah, later in life it was better for gaming, just not at first. C&C always sits with me because I waited for years to get a computer to play it only to find out it wasn't supported on Win2000. It ran Tiberian Sun just fine though.It was actually the first time I called a company to ask for software support, I called Westwood's help line to ask about getting C&C to run on my computer and they basically said it wasn't going to happen.
>>12020363>ME comes out and attempts to rectify thatME wasn't attempting to rectify anything from 2000 as they're from completely different lines of productsME is a 9x Windows2000 is an NT WindowsTwo completely different lines
>>12020536Ok... they still came out with it because a lot of programs and games still didn't support NT.
>>12016995It's when Microsoft started going to shit, people forget how SHIT XP was when it first came out, it was SLOW, the interface was horrible, you had so much trouble running DOS shit on it because the emulator was SHIT. In the end I ended up going back to 98SE until many years later.
>>12020545Consumers didn't use NTAgain the release of ME has nothing to do with 2000
>>12020554Home users did install and use Windows 2000.
>>12020554A good chunk of Dell's home computer lines came with Windows 2000 at the time. I don't know about other vendors back then.
>>12020363>ME was a piece of shit.t. i parrot whatever reddit and youtube say.
>>12016995>how was XYZshut up shut up shut up shut up shut up
>>12016995My first pc was with window ME probably the worst system ever created, it was always freezing, or crushing
>>12020979ME really was that terrible. There is a reason it had the shortest lifespan of any microsoft OS (failed even faster than vista or win 8). Pic related is PC world article from 2006 and it made #4 in their "top 20 worst texh products of all time" list. The system restore feature sounded good on paper but waiting 37 minutes for windows to shut down after you request to turn it off was a no go.
>>12021490>look mom, i did it again, i can't stop parroting shit!dude, i used me during the time and it gave me the same amount of trouble 98se.
>>12021881(cont)I couldn't reach the keyboard on either without siting on daddys lap
Your experience with ME likely depended upon your hardware. I haven't used it in forever, but I hear that as long as you're using good hardware with proper drivers, it can be quite pleasant to use, though you could say the same about any version of Windows pretty much so idk if that even means anything.
>>12021881>parrotingIf by parroting mean citing every article and review written when it was new, all of them shitting on it, and using it firsthand and knowing how terrible it was then sure. I am a silly parrot.I stuck with 98 right through to XP after XP was fixed with SPs many years later. My parents bought a computer off the shelf and they were stuck with it, and I had to perpetually try and unfuck it because boomer parents were too trusting. This was the peak years of popups, firefox didnt exist yet and IE6 was a whore with her legs spread wide inviting the entire internet to violate her with diseased semen. It was as aweful as it sounds.A gamer buddy of mine had ME and he lived with that aids PC for half a year before wiping it and starting clean with 98 again. I wasnt exaggerating in the previous post about how long the fucking OS took to shut down, listening to your hard drive grind to dust for almost a half hour. It was genuine dogshit. Just comparing it to 98SE it doesnt measure up:>Pros: for the most part it is lipstick on 98. you are just re-buing 98 and 98 is good if you dont already have it>Pros: It came with IE 6 and windows media player! (Serious, this was the core marketing campaign, two free programs included)>Pro: it had the shortest life span of any microsoft ever and was mercifully discontinued in record time>Cons: system restore was a broken mess and devoured extra hard drive space uncontrollably if left unchecked. if disabled, ME ran only slightly worse than 98 did>Cons: dos was gutted, reboot in dos mode was removed. >Cons: even with all the new shit disabled, it still performed worse in gaming than 98SE due to OS bloat
>>12021389Never used ME, but my uncle had 2000 and it was shit honestly. People here prop it up, but his installation would crash all the time and you could run fuck all games on it properly.
>>12022382it is pretty much what >>12022101 said.i also hold of from XP because it was a piece of shit, but some of the QoL changes it brought were nice and i had a ME install disc lying around, so i installed that once i got enough of trying XP.it's a shame you didn't know about mozilla previous browser, netscape. that would have saved you a lot of headaches.anyway, i remember i had a nice pc, athlon 1.3ghz 256mb ram, no video card though, only via unichrome integrated graphics. and ME never gave me the issues people talk about.also, this is the first time i read about system restore specifically being an issue. this is usually one of the things ME is praised about.was your buddy pc a preassembled one? preassembled were always crap, bare minimum requirements to run whatever came installed and software bloat to slow them down even more. so i do see where the reviews and criticism is coming from, it is just not pointing in the right direction.
>>12023372The biggest problem with ME and 2000 was the names.>name two home versions after the year they release, then call the next home version "Millenium Edition" while releasing the next business version as 2000 at the same timeBut ME was just a crash-prone mess, even on a fresh install.
>>12023372I mean there's a reason why the recommendation for P2-P3 gaming is generally 98SE
>>12023493>it's a shame you didn't know about mozilla previous browser, netscapeYou cannot be serious. I started with mosaic on my old US robotics 14.4, and first used netscape starting with 2.0 when I was in university, although I was using linux at the time. At home I eventually put netscape on my win95 machine and later the 98 machine. >was your buddy pc a preassembled one?No, it was probably the 4th PC he built at that point. He wanted to try ME as his media PC located in his home theater cabinet, since he fell for the marketing that ME had enhanced media capabilities (It was just the latest version of media player, and had some DRM fuckery, it was awful). It was a Pentium 3 paired up with an ATI all in wonder 128 ,so 1998-1999 era components. Nothing too old when ME landed. I vividly remember the all-in-wonder as he was a huge video nerd and he swore by ATI for that era.The one thing it was built for, it was terrible at. Sucked for media, took forever to boot, even longer to shut down. The XP build he replaced it with soon after had remained his media PC for the next 12 years and it was totally stable. It was a night and day difference.
>>12024387>It was a Pentium 3 paired up with an ATI all in wonder 128well anon, i have exactly that hardware.the retro pc i have (in storage now) is the fully upgraded pc my old man used back in the day. asus p3b-f with pentium 3 933mhz with an ati all-in-wonder 128 pci. i replaced it with a geforce 256 but still have it.it may be something with ati cards, but i remember my dad trying ME and complaining the pc becoming slow after using msdos programs specifically, so it was kinda expected because of the cutdown msdos support. he was also a fan of the all in wonder line of cards, he had the aiw pro before. he stopped with the 128 because they became too expensive after that.i never had any issue with the geforce 256 (and as i mentioned before, i had an amd processor with via chipset, i remember them having ME specific drivers) but i also didn't really use msdos much anymore and in my current setup i added dualboot into msdos 7.1 or win ME.i could certainly do some tests with the aiw during the week if i get the time.
It was minor. The biggest QoL boost came when I got a Core 2 Duo and paired it with XP because suddenly I could play games *and* run other shit without a ton of compromises.
>>12019959parroting someone is maximum seethe, love to see it
>>12016995Depends how early on you jumped. 2000-2001 - you'd experience games getting day 1 patches to fix 2K/XP only crashes, and you'd bitch about XP having too much bloat compared to 2K.2002-2003 - Microsoft had to extend Win98 support because it was still way too popular (ha ha, good luck Win10 getting the same treatment).2003-2004 - you'd get fucked by viruses nonstop (welchia, sobig, etc), it was so bad you got a globe-spanning megavirus every week, especially in 2003 August. Then in 2004 you have to deal with lsass.exe forcing your machine to reboot in one minute.If you moved to XP later on with SP2 and USB2 drivers built in, you got a huge increase in stability and speed with very little downsides unless you still used old DOS era games which simply didn't work any more. Any shorter and it still fucked up regularly like 98, just say on a weekly basis instead of a daily one.
>>12019530>98's RAM limitations were disgusting and if you had more 256MB RAM or more you basically needed to run XP or 2000.I ran it with 384MB RAM, still have the machine, I think it was a 256 + 128 stick but I don't remember it exactly.Jumping to XP in 2003 with 512MB RAM wasn't a big deal, but the hard drive was quieter/faster and the cpu was monstrously good, all the emulators that played at 20fps previously were now running at full 60fps (jumped from K6-2 to Athlon XP).
XP was a piece of shit until SP2 came out.If you used it before that, you'll probably remember this screen.
