I’m seeing a lot of videos on YouTube recently with folk installing Windows 98 SE on pretty modern hardware.

If you find pcie cards with drivers that work in 98, it seems they just work. Pcie is backwards compatible from that standpoint it seems. It’s just lack of software that makes most of it not work. For stuff that does work, there is network cards, graphics cards (with slight driver tweaks usually), usb 2.0 cards, sound cards, and more.

Too much memory can be handled by MaxPhysMem settings and a few other tweaks.

What isn’t clear to me is the lack of chipset drivers for these boards. There is always commentary on getting a board with drivers but if people are successfully running 13th gen intel stuff on Windows, what is the harm?

I’m here looking for old unknown quality hardware at a price premium because I want to run programs, not necessarily reminisce about period correct old hardware. I come from a world where FPGA is the perfect solution to classic consoles. The old physical machine means little to me. 86box is just a bit outside of daily use with its very high system requirements for pentium ii era emulation or it would be fantastic for me.

Is there a start to finish generalized guide to follow so that someone could get Windows 98 running on a cheap $50 dell office computer? I mean an intel i5 2500 is basically free.