WTB: PC133 SDRAM

E

einz

Gawd
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Jul 27, 2004
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Hi all, I've been struck by the nostalgia bug, so I'm looking to source some retro parts to put together a WIn98/XP/2K rig. Instead of going to eBay, I was curious if folks here have some old school RAM lying around that they wouldn't mind letting go/being put back to use. PM me with offers, I'm ideally looking for 4x 512MB, but I'm not picky.
 
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512 MB wasnt that common outside ECC registered stuff for PC133, your not going to have an easy time finding that big of sticks. Plus a lot of boards outside server ones wont handle that much memory. Heck the intel 815 series boards could only use a max of 512 MB.
 
Starfalcon said:
512 MB wasnt that common outside ECC registered stuff for PC133, your not going to have an easy time finding that big of sticks. Plus a lot of boards outside server ones wont handle that much memory. Heck the intel 815 series boards could only use a max of 512 MB.
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Yeah I hear ya, one can dream though! I tracked down an old Abit VP6 and the Apollo 133A chipset should support 512MB modules.
 
Yeah VIA was one of the few companies to support a lot of ram, intel was too busy segmenting the market even back then. I hope you can find some, I only have a few sticks of it and mine are all ECC registered sticks that I use in some old duallie boards.
 
VP6 - I loved that thing! I had two P3 700mhz OCed to 1ghz on it. Oh, those were the days. What video card are you going to use with your build?
Do you recall the IBM death star hard drives?
 
PremiumG said:
VP6 - I loved that thing! I had two P3 700mhz OCed to 1ghz on it. Oh, those were the days. What video card are you going to use with your build?
Do you recall the IBM death star hard drives?
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Oh god that triggers some horrible memories. A buddy and I both had the death star and luckily I swapped mine out before it died. He wasn't as lucky. I have a Voodoo 3 3000 sitting in storage that I'm hoping still works. I still regret selling my old Voodoo5 back in the day.


auntjemima said:
I was going to offer some up, but Jesus, 512mb? Lol
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So much hate lol. I'll take less, was just dreaming! PM incoming
 
einz said:
Yeah I hear ya, one can dream though! I tracked down an old Abit VP6 and the Apollo 133A chipset should support 512MB modules.
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But you're alreaqdy going to have issues running Windows 98 with over 512mb ram, so why push things to 2TB?

I had no trouble rtunning 192MB ram on my old BH6 98SE system, but when I tried dual-booting 98 on my new Athlon XP Win2k system with 256MB ram plus new Radeon 8500), it wouldn't boot.

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1038886
 
auntjemima said:
I never had an issue. The limit for Windows 98 is supposedly 1gb.
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This techpot forum post would say otherwise : they are also hitting the wall on 512MB total installed memory.\
https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/win-98-memory-above-512meg.368/

And both this and the Ars forum thread agree: adding more than 256MB ram to a Win 98 system will slow it down (that includes VRAM, + system ram plus anything else I/O mapped). The total ,memory map has to be under 512mb.

I'm not a fucking fool, and I researched the hell out of this back when I hit that wall; by 2004, I decided that DosBox was an acceptable alternative to keeoing multi;pl boces.
 
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defaultluser said:
This techpot forum post would say otherwise : they are also hitting the wall on 512MB total installed memory.\
https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/win-98-memory-above-512meg.368/

And both this and the Ars forum thread agree: adding more than 256MB ram to a Win 98 system will slow it down (that includes VRAM, + system ram plus anything else I/O mapped). The total ,memory map has to be under 512mb.

I'm not a fucking fool, and I researched the hell out of this back when I hit that wall; by 2004, I decided that DosBox was an acceptable alternative.
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Hmm, that's good to know. Maybe I'll keep 512MB handy if I'm running 98, and try to fill up as much as I can if I'm running XP.
 
I ran 512 MB on my Asus Cusl-2c board with 98, I had to do a bunch of edits to windows to make it even work with it back in the day. It never even used a fraction of all that memory anyway, so it was kinda a waste. Win 2k was much better at using that memory though.
 
einz
You can run large drives and a couple gigs of memory in 98, you just to need to install all of the unofficial win98 extension patchesmade by the retro community over the past 20 years or so (google / look on vogons for Windows 98 patches for a guide). Here’s a Windows 98 patch I’ve used before (last updated October 2020!): http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/. Anyways, worth mentioning none of these patches are straightforward. Definitely read up on it before trashing your install.

You’ll want to run something like 256mb ram and a 64gb drive initially, then do your patches and you can test adding additional memory / storage.

Also if you’re really serious about 512mb sdram, you can try to hunt down some broken power mac G4 towers. The early models of those could be ordered with over a gig of sdram. Look for the grey/blue/clear ones (later silver/chrome ones are all DDR I think).
 
SamuelL421 said:
einz
You can run large drives and a couple gigs of memory in 98, you just to need to install all of the unofficial win98 extension patchesmade by the retro community over the past 20 years or so (google / look on vogons for Windows 98 patches for a guide). Here’s a Windows 98 patch I’ve used before (last updated October 2020!): http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/. Anyways, worth mentioning none of these patches are straightforward. Definitely read up on it before trashing your install.

You’ll want to run something like 256mb ram and a 64gb drive initially, then do your patches and you can test adding additional memory / storage.

Also if you’re really serious about 512mb sdram, you can try to hunt down some broken power mac G4 towers. The early models of those could be ordered with over a gig of sdram. Look for the grey/blue/clear ones (later silver/chrome ones are all DDR I think).
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what, pray tell is the fucking point of all that custom work, when you can't find a single program that requires windows 98 that can make use of more than 128mb of it?

If you already go through the trouble e of having a custom-built Win98 box, why hack it to hell and back, when yoy can just build a second xp dedicated one?
 
defaultluser said:
what, pray tell is the fucking point of all that custom work, when you can't find a single program that requires windows 98 that can make use of more than 128mb of it?

If you already go through the trouble e of having a custom-built Win98 box, why hack it to hell and back, when yoy can just build a second xp dedicated one?
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Doing a bunch of custom work on an old OS is mostly because you can. One of those "the journey, not the destination"-type of projects. Similar to someone fiddling with something like Arch linux for days when they could just go download an ISO of ubuntu and be done.

Besides doing it for the sake of doing it, you can definitely make use of additional memory in Windows 98. A decent number of early 00's / XP-era games can be run on 98 (after patches) assuming the hardware can handle it. It's about having one system that can run the whole gamut of software from early 90's to early 00's. Also any old professional software works much better with additional memory too. Stupid stuff like using a modern web browser is also possible - though there's about 50 disclaimers that need to be attached to that statement, like how you need unofficial patches, updated root certificates, kmelon for win9x, a firewall, a proxy with AV (ideally), etc, etc...
 
SamuelL421 said:
Doing a bunch of custom work on an old OS is mostly because you can. One of those "the journey, not the destination"-type of projects. Similar to someone fiddling with something like Arch linux for days when they could just go download an ISO of ubuntu and be done.

Besides doing it for the sake of doing it, you can definitely make use of additional memory in Windows 98. A decent number of early 00's / XP-era games can be run on 98 (after patches) assuming the hardware can handle it. It's about having one system that can run the whole gamut of software from early 90's to early 00's. Also any old professional software works much better with additional memory too. Stupid stuff like using a modern web browser is also possible - though there's about 50 disclaimers that need to be attached to that statement, like how you need unofficial patches, updated root certificates, kmelon for win9x, a firewall, a proxy with AV (ideally), etc, etc...
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And yet, you can get that same level of satisfaction by building a second XP system (fo that game you bothered hacking0

The reason desktop L9nux is well under 5% is because almost nobody want to bother with the constant hacking.
 
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defaultluser said:
And yet, you can get that same level of satisfaction by building a second XP system (fo that game you bothered hacking0

The reason desktop L9nux is well under 5% is because almost nobody want to bother with the constant hacking.
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For the most part, yeah. I certainly wouldn't encourage anybody to build a 98se system over XP unless they already had some interest in doing and had one of the use cases I mentioned above - like games or old software that only runs under Win 9x.

All that being said, there are ton of unofficial patches for XP now as well, so you can get the hacking satisfaction from that too ;)
 
I should have the following available, if I can find it (it's been a while since I put my parts spreadsheet together!):

1613156861147.png


If interested in any of that, let me know and I'll go digging..
 
So I have some older IBM p4 1.8ghz s478 systems that are still alive. One of them has 256MBx3 for 768MB and the other has 512MBx3 for 1.5GB. These can't use ecc reg, but can use the ecc if all the modules are ecc. In my research on the chipset, they actually natively supported 3GB of ram, so my quest at some point will be to get 3x 1GB ecc non-reg modules, but they're not cheap. IBM made some solid stuff as they keep running even after being on 24x7 for almost a decade as servers for hotel property management systems until they were tossed into storage and forgotten. Even the original hard drives are working. :) (I hope I don't jinx them now.)
 
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