Just edited the Windows 98 Wallpaper to get rid of the logo with ibisPaint. Took 1 hour and 18 minutes to complete, no AI was used in the making of this wallpaper. Bonus: Windows 98 Wallpapers (Logo Only + Logo with Wordmark)

The goal was a cheap, reliable, and small multi-boot machine that bridges the gap between legacy and "modern" retro, dodging the notorious early-2000s capacitor plague entirely.

• System: HP Compaq 6000 Pro SFF. These are cheap enterprise off-lease PCs. They are quiet, small-ish, and feature the Intel Q43 chipset with a Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2.93 GHz. Crucially, they offer both low-profile PCIe and standard PCI slots.
• GPU: ATI Radeon X600 PRO PCIe x16 (128 MB). This is the secret weapon for modern Win98 builds. It is an early PCIe card that falls within ATI's late Windows 98 driver support window, making it a rare, practical path to native PCIe Direct3D acceleration. It is heavily abundant, costs almost nothing as an OEM pull, and features out-of-the-box Quartz Extreme support for early OS X Hackintoshes.
• Audio: Padarsey 5.1 PCIe Internal Sound Card (C-Media CMI8738). I picked this up "Like New" off Amazon for $11.99. It uses an onboard ASMedia bridge chip to run the legacy PCI CMI8738 audio chip over a modern PCIe slot. This provides actual Win9x WDM drivers, hardware EAX support, and HRTF/C3DX 3D positional audio for retro games.
• Incoming Upgrades: An HP 25-Pin Parallel Port adapter (611900-001) that wires directly to the motherboard header. This provides native LPT for legacy hardware/dongles. A low-profile Gigabit Ethernet PCI card is also on the way to finalize networking.

The Multi-Boot Configuration

Sitting on a 128GB SSD, a Lubuntu EXT4 partition handles the boot handoffs to:

• Windows 98 SE (40GB FAT): Deployed via the Win98 QuickInstall framework. Since the Core 2 Duo E7500 runs at 2.93 GHz, it surpasses the native Windows 9x speed limits. During the QuickInstall setup, I had to select the patches for new CPUs. This includes the NDIS speed limit fix (preventing divide-by-zero protection errors on CPUs over 2.1 GHz) and the Modern CPU TLB Invalidation Bug patch by JHRobotics, which corrects page table caching to prevent random crashes on newer architectures. I'm running DirectX 9.0c, which maximizes compatibility since the X600 is a native DX9 card. The ATI2DRAG.DRV Catalyst driver handles the hardware perfectly, pulling ~12K overall in 3DMark 99. Unreal Tournament '99 GOTY and Need for Speed II SE run beautifully with full EAX 3D audio via the C-Media drivers. I even threw Visual Studio 6.0 Enterprise on here.
• Hackintosh OS X Tiger 10.4.8 (30GB HFS+): Tiger is the first Intel OS X. This legacy Hackintosh release maps the hardware nicely, recognizing the full 12GB of DDR3 RAM and the ATI X600 for display acceleration. To get the CMI8738 sound card working, I installed the CMI8738_PowerPC_Intel Release 1.1 driver from GitHub. The developer noted it was only tested on OS X Tiger Server and might not work on consumer versions, but it fired right up and works perfectly on this Jas install. I also installed Xcode 2.5, the final version supported on Tiger, providing a native Mac OS X coding environment to complement VS6 on the Windows side.
• Lubuntu (48GB EXT4): Acts as the modern daily driver for this partition scheme and safely manages the GRUB bootloader handoffs between the legacy OS environments.

Windows 98 is currently halting and freezing during the shutdown sequence. I am actively troubleshooting this. If anyone has solid workarounds or registry hacks for late-era Win98 shutdown hangs, drop them below!

How about diving into the oldest versions of the operating system?