If you’re elbow-deep in ’90s retrocomputing and maintain a fleet of your own personal seemingly identical but definitely completely different Windows 98 machines, Windows 9x QuickInstall is tailor-made just for you.
It takes the root file system of an already installed Windows 98 system and packages it, whilst allowing drivers and tools to be slipstreamed at will.
For the installer, it uses Linux as a base, paired with some tools to allow hard disk partitioning and formatting, as well as a custom installer with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking.
↫ Windows 9x QuickInstall gitHub page
What you end up with is an easily customisable packaged Windows 98 installation that can be installed onto computers (or in virtual machines, I guess) at blazing speeds. It’s a relatively simple concept, but its implementation is genius and definitely not simple at all. This is a great tool for the retrocomputing community.
VXD vs whatever windows was doing at the time. It was a complete mess, and it lacked SMP, the best DOS card was a Tseng 4000/6000, the best windows 95 card ever made was the radeon ddr, windows 98 best card is up for debate, but i say 9800XT ViVO by powercolor.
Over all these years there has been hundreds of emulators to get windows 9x to run, but i just want to run BeOS with mclintock’s svg theme and, a decent browser, and non laggy video. Yes i know Haiku can do all of that, but it all looks too CSS, and it can not do as far as i know sound over HDMI. I can live with 640×40, but without sound it is not for me personally.
On my bare metal Haiku machine, I just plug the extra analog input connector from my speakers (Edifier R1280T) into the line out jack on the PC. If your speakers don’t have multiple inputs you could use a splitter or duplexer.
Also, PCEm and 86Box have excellent support for BeOS, including emulated Matrox and Voodoo graphics cards which were fully supported in BeOS back in the day. I’ve had no issues with better-than-native speed running the OS under those emulators, including video playback. I still want to find or build a period correct 100% natively supported BeOS workstation one day, but until then emulation works fine.
Read Why Not Wye? for why you don’t want to use a passive splitter that way. (TL;DR: It could damage your equipment. Never connect two outputs together without components to protect them from each other.)
What you want is one of these audio mixers from China ($20 CAD with aluminum case, less without) and a suitable wall wart from your bin of spare parts:
1PCS DC 5V-12V Stereo Audio Signal Mixer Board Mix 2way 4way Input 1way Output
(I use one to share my Linux Ryzen machine’s Line In port between my Windows 7 “game console but not a console”, my Mac Mini G4 running MacOS9Lives OS 9, my Wyse Cx0 thin client running Windows XP on an upgraded IDE/PATA DoM, and my HP t5530 thin client running Windows 98SE on an upgraded IDE/PATA DoM… the full-size retro-hobby PCs are on another desk.)
I’m sorry I should have clarified I wasn’t talking about a passive splitter. I have an audio switch box, it takes two sources and has one output, and the sources are physically isolated by a hardware switch, I have two computers using that with one of my speakers’ inputs, and a third computer on the speakers’ other input.
I’m incorrectly referring to it as a splitter and thank you for the correction.
Ahh. I have one of those on my retro-hobby desk, but I’m planning to replace it with another $20 Chinese mixer… probably at the same time that I solder up another ps2x2pico to replace my USB4VC so I don’t need a preflight checklist to turn my USB-to-PS2 converter on and off safely.
What can I say? I take almost as much pleasure in simplifying the operating instructions for my retro-hobby stuff as I do from installing Noctua fans, SSDs, and NICs in them.
I’m very much a rose-coloured glasses kind of retro-hobbyist.
Nice! I was just wondering whether something like this existed for 98SE a few days ago while using nLite to slipstream Unofficial SP4 into my Windows XP CD.