Virtual PC: Windows 98

Hi!

I've just (literally, today) installed Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, and onto that my old copy of Windows 98SE. Almost everything works - Virtual PC successfully tells 98SE what my sound card, DDR2 RAM, and dual-core CPU are. However, it fails to recognize my graphics card - insisting it is a S3 Trio32/64 PCI (732/764) with 4 mb of VRAM, which I have never heard of before. This would be fine if D3D games would work with this card - but they don't, as I found out with Speed Busters. It seems to be DirectX 8.1b compatible, but has caused me problems in 4 games: Colin McRae Rally (where the screen is weirdly distorted; it has half the sides chopped off, making driving... interesting), Speed Busters (needs D3D), Kart Challenge (won't even start) and Superbike Challenge (weirdly coloured and pixelated graphics once racing, unusable). My actual graphics card is an EVGA-NVidia 8600 GTS with 256 mb of video RAM. The S3 Trio is also giving a strange problem - the only way I can get 32 bit colour is to run in 640x480, which is strange to someone used to 1440x900 on my Vista host OS. 16 bit stops any further up from 1024x768, which is where I've set the resolution. What made me laugh was that I can use a higher resolution in 98SE (albeit in 256 colours) than I can in Vista, due to what my monitor can support. Despite this, running the games I can play in high graphics settings doesn't cause an issue, even if they actually need more than a 4 mb card to run those settings, which confuses me.

My second issue is that after installing Windows 98SE onto a 4 GB virtual disk, I decided to create an 8 GB slave - which I cannot install. All the internet help points to using fdisk - which crashes the entire OS every time I select 'Yes' to the large hard drive support.

The final question is: Can I legally download the Plus! pack now, and if so, where from?

 

Thanks for the info on the S3. I wonder if there is a user-made patch that enables XP drivers to work on 98?

 

I've researched Virtual PC 2007, and discovered the reason for the graphics issue: that is the card it emulates. So, I'm going to try VMWare.

 

I downloaded VMWare Player, but that isn't booting the OS at all. Any ideas?

 

That guide doesn't correspond to my version - 2.5. I guess I'll look for v2 then, as nothing I do with 2.5 has any effect

EDIT: Why is v2 so BIG?

EDIT 2: Fixed the slave hard drive issue - tricked 98SE into thinking it was a removable disk, formatting now

 

VMWare Player 2 tells me it can't convert the OS file into its format, so I'm still stuck.

EDIT: Fixed! I downloaded VMware converter, re-did the entire 98 set (it was wrecked on VirtualPC as well), converted it, and I have access!

EDIT 2: Now all I need is for it to tell Windows 98 my graphics card is something like a GeForce 6 series, and that I actually have a CD/DVD drive... 98 is installed, but these things are hamstringing it...