Installation, updates, general problem solving and assistance.
Kakalake

2017-11-04 16:44 »

Is it compatible with the French edition of windows 98SE ?

I have an old IBM PC330 :
200Mhz MMX overdrive
128Mo of RAM
8Go CF card (primary HDD)
8.4Go (secondary HDD)
3dFx Voodoo 1

I just use it to play old 3dfx Voodoo compatible games.
could be cool to test your service pack.

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-12 01:44 »

Good evening everyone,

I'm trying to install 3.57 on a freshly installed English US Windows 98 SE.

I check Main Updates and installer proceeds, but nothing happens after that.

I see a minimized window on the taskbar that says INFEX, but it stays there forever and installer never finishes.

I don't know what I should do next. Any help is welcome

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-12 19:25 »

This is an update to my previous post.

I managed to pinpoint the problem to 4DOS 8.00.

Replacing 4DOS with COMMAND.COM solves the issue. I find this odd, as I've been using 4DOS for a good 10 years now, and I never had any problems with USP.

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-13 02:52 »

New update on my previous posts:

It appears USP 3.57 fails with 4DOS 8.00 if 4START.BAT and 4EXIT.BAT exist in 4DOS install directoy.

Deleting both files fixes USP 3.57 and it now finishes installation without any further trouble.

Sorry for the triple post. I've been looking for a way to edit my previous posts but couldn't find any.

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2017-11-13 04:00 »

PoulpSquad wrote:...Sorry for the triple post. I've been looking for a way to edit my previous posts but couldn't find any.

It's no problem. Post stuff as much as you need. You can't edit posts in here because we don't like changing history. :mrgreen:

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-27 10:55 »

Thank you for your understanding.

Regrettably, it didn't take long for me to get stuck on another issue.

I'm working on a little retro computing project of mine, based on Windows 98 SE with USP and involving a bunch of Windows games.

I'm having issues with a couple of them. Dark Reign and MDK2 will display this error message:

"IMAGEHLP.DLL file is linked to missing export MSVCRT.DLL??_U@YAPAXI@Z."

After inspecting this IMAGEHLP.DLL file in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM, it appears it comes from Windows XP.
Replacing this file with IMAGEHLP.DLL from Windows ME fixes the problem.

SimCity 3000 Unlimited will complain about MSVCP60.DLL and MSVCRT.DLL. Replacing both with the ones provided with the game fixes the issue.

The games have all the correct dlls required in their installation directories, but they keep using the more recent ones registered by USP.

Fixing these issues is trivial, as it's a simple matter of overwriting the newer dlls with the ones of the games, but I'm not a fan of this solution, and it requires rebooting in DOS mode to overwrite some files.

Is it possible to force a program to use dlls available on its installation directory? How can I achieve that?

As usual, thanks for reading this.

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-28 06:51 »

Adding a PATH statement to point to a folder with older DLLs doesn't work.
Renaming the newer DLLs works somewhat in case of Visual C++ libraries, but if IMAGEHLP.DLL is used once, Windows locks it down
and it can't be deleted until next reboot.
Using REGSVR32.EXE to unregister DLLs doesn't work for IMAGEHLP.DLL.

It seems I'm pretty stuck in DLL hell, so I'll have to reluctantly replace at least 2 DLLs in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM with older ones if I want to run older apps.

I'm now wondering what are the implications of replacing both MSVCRT.DLL and IMAGEHLP.DLL with older versions.
Would that break USP? Are there components relying on these? More generally, is there a way to check components dependencies?

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2017-11-28 19:33 »

You should be alright replacing the files in needed. It shouldn't break anything using older versions.

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PoulpSquad
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2017-11-28 20:53 »

Thanks a lot for your help, I appreciate it.
Do I need to register MSVCRT.DLL file after replacing it (and any other C++ library)?
Are there any entries I should modify in the registry?

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PROBLEMCHYLD
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2017-11-29 04:37 »

Just replace and reboot and you're good to go. :mrgreen:

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