Win 98 non-SE

Well, my sister found out the hard way that she had Win 98 "first edition". It appears RMM requires Win 98 SE or later, due to requiring WMP 9.0 or higher to function. RMML (from the 1.25 firmware) is taking up the slack very well, actually, at this point in time (with my techy assistance). Without my assistance, though, I'm sure the unit would have been returned as she can't afford a new computer, esp. after this purchase!

I checked the requirements, it's advertised to require Win 98SE or later, so I suppose Rio is doing the best they can there.

I just wonder if perhaps RMM could be made to work, in crippled mode (no WMA support?) under Win 98 "first edition". [yeah, I figure that's pretty difficult, but just passing that "idea" on.]

-brendan

yeah, I figure that's pretty difficult, but just passing that "idea" on.

It might be possible, but I severely doubt it. I don't now remember the technical reasons why we didn't support Win98 stock, but they were quite compelling. Some of the core APIs used by RMM changed significantly between Win98 and Win98SE.

Ah. USB support? Maybe that was it. WMP9 was definitely one of the reasons. I think the fact that COM/OLE changed in Win98SE might have been another.

The other reason that Win98 stock isn't supported is the QA effort required to test yet another operating system variant (in 5 different languages, as well).

USB support?

Yes, if I remember correctly, one of the major upgrades that were made in Win'98SE was the USB support that was not present in version 1.

By the way, it is trivial to upgrade to SE. You can get a SE upgrade CD from Microsoft for very inexpensive or free if you have a legitimate Windows 98 license.

Or you can take it to your local computer guru and he should have a few SE discs laying around that he could upgrade you with and copy the CABs down to the hard drive for future maintanence.

It wasn't USB. The USB update for Win98 first edition allowed the Karma to be recognized, and her machine was able to do the firmware update just fine. If the problem was in the USB area, perhaps the mass storage driver, assuming the firmware update doesn't use that? If the firmware update writes a file directly to the drive, then it can't be that either.

As far as I can tell the reason RMM won't work is calls into WMVCORE.DLL that don't exist in windows media 7.1 (but should exist in windows media 9.0). Of course, there could be other problems.

My understanding of Windows 98 SE is that there is neither an upgrade CD nor a full installer CD: it was only made available to OEM hardware manufacturers.

We talked about upgrading to Win2K, but as it's an 80MB RAM/3GB across two hard drives machine, that's not an option without some additional hardware or a new machine.

But yeah, I understand the "five OSs, plus n languages each is enough environments to test" issue way too deeply.

-brendan

I'm pretty sure I have a full installer CD for W98SE downstairs somewhere, but yes, it probably did come with some PC.

My understanding of Windows 98 SE is that there is neither an upgrade CD nor a full installer CD: it was only made available to OEM hardware manufacturers.

Someone lied to you. Right after it came out you could order a Second Edition Update CD direct from Microsoft. Also, Any copy of Windows 98 you can buy off the shelf these days will be SE. If I can find my old SE updates CD, I'll upload an ISO image.

Maybe he's thinking of Win95 OSR2? That one was only available to OEMs from what I remember

That is true.

I'm an OEM, and can (and did) purchase/resell Win98/Win2k/WinME FULL licenses. Or could, back when they were still available.

Cheers

> Maybe he's thinking of Win95 OSR2? That one was only available to OEMs from what I remember

Ack, that sounds right. my bad.

-brendan

I *was* able to get the WMVCore stuff installed on 98-retail at first. *Specifically* to get RMM running because I ran into the same thing you just did. So it can be done. But it took some real hacking tricks. I don't have the information here in front of me right now, I'll see if I can look it up.

Aha! FAQ Master *and* IAQ Master it appears.

I did some cursory searches for replacement WMVCore.dll files (driversguide.com, etc) but didn't find anything I felt safe mucking about with.

Neither the WM9 installer or the distributable library set from microsoft.com (the latter of which I believe is used by the RMM uber-installer itself) would install directly.

Now that I'm sure someone "out there" has done it, I think I'll do it too. That is, if he can remember what he did!

-brendan

Neither the WM9 installer or the distributable library set from microsoft.com (the latter of which I believe is used by the RMM uber-installer itself) would install directly.

What I did is took the distributable library set from Microsoft, began the install procedure to where it was sitting at the error box, then alt-tabbed and picked off the necessary files from the temp directory somehow. I was unable to find the information reminding me of what I'd done, so this is from vague fuzzy memory.

It's also possible that I somehow faked out the installer by editing the installation script files, thus allowing it to install on 98-retail. Sometimes I do things like that, not sure if I did it on that one.

Heh, ok. I'll check that out. I suppose I need to learn a little bit more about MS's packaging tools anyway.

Well, I don't need to. Nor do I want to. But it might come in handy later too.

Thanks,
-brendan

I just checked it out again... You don't need to mess with Microsoft's packaging tools. All you do is:

- Clean out your TEMP folder completely.

- Run the setup for the Windows Media 9 SDK Runtime.

- During the setup, alt-tab out and peek in the TEMP folder and save off those files. They're all just loose in the temp folder.

- Use the DEPENDENCY WALKER utility (comes with Visual Studio or I'm sure you can get it elsewhere) to see which sub-modules of WMVCORE you still need.

- Put those modules into SYSTEM and self-register them (Dependency walker can also show you which ones need self registering... they have DLLRegisterServer in them).

I'm pretty sure that's all I needed to do to make it work. I think. Good luck!

Only a month late! Here's the Windows 98 Second Edition Updates ISO image I mentioned earlier. I don't think there are any legal issues with posting it because MS was sending it free upon request after SE came out.

Thanks tony and meatballman:

We (family) all ended up all chipping in and buying her (most of) a new Athlon XP 3000 Win XP machine for xmas. The 3GB of storage (over two separate hard drives) on the old machine just seemed too sad...

She's attached to the karma big-time now.

But, thanks for the instructions and ISO. One or both might come in handy later!

-brendan