Oh, first hands information then 🙂 Do you have any particular oddities to share?

What did you do for ME? Seems like there were a lot of development with the WDM drivers (instead of VxD) and also that whole removal of MS-DOS?

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I have some old cd's of various builds of Neptune. Also, the code for ME actually added dual cpu support but it was commented out of the released builds due to lack of time for testing. Oh and immediately after ME shipped we were all split between XP and windows embedded and all of the 9x team disbanded aside from support so OEMS couldn't ask for another 9x spin.

@@MissNorington My work on all three OSs was centered on ACPI support, on ME I owned testing of third party audio and video drivers specifically. One reason it has so few inbox drivers is that there was no time for bug fixes so if a bug was raised and the device was not shipping in a OEM system that fall, the driver was simply cut. ME actually is remarkably stable....as long as you run it on a computer sold between November 2000 and June of 2001.

@@ReflexVE That's really interesting. There happens to be a whole community that's interested in researching these old builds and reporting their findings in the process, myself included. For the longest time, we've only had access to build 5111 from December 1999. We really only know about the existence of other builds thanks to file version references from various builds of Millennium.

Thank you, glad you like it!

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I agree, the amount of work (including research) you do for each video is incredible 👍

@@doslogoThanks for the appreciation! :)

If you want real-mode MS-DOS support functional in ME (that means, bootable into Windows GUI as well), just use the official binaries in the LTOOLS folder of the OEM CD-ROM. No patching is needed. Retail doesn't have it, only OEM.

When reading up the history on Windows Me, I understood they just shifted it in because Neptune didn't fare, and Whistler (XP) was still too far away. From a technology point of view, Me didn't really advance anything.

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR At that time I was dual booting Windows 2000 and 98. 98 for older games and 2k for everything else. My point is that 2k Pro was already perfectly suitable for desktop use. They didn't have to wait for XP to be ready. Adjusting 2k licensing, so it would be affordable for home user, would be more than enough.

NT had years to improve. ME had....14 months.

@@pvc988The DOS/Gaming compatibility it was ... I had NT4 as my desktop OS since 1996, still dual-booting with 98/98SE. Wenn Windows 2000 came, I was pretty much done with DOS games, and well into Quake III Arena and the like FPS, which ran just fine on Windows 2000.

If I had a company in 2001, I would have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for breaking DOS compatibility. The NT line has caused a lot of problems with driver and software compatiblity. Imagine getting a new PC in 2001 running Windows ME, migrating all your software and applications to it, then deciding to upgrade to Windows XP and then having the computer unusable because of kernel change, interrupting software and hardware functionality.

🙂

"What for?" We all love MS-DOS and Windows (sometimes a little bit too much) 😋

@@doslogoHopefull not just DOS and Windows, but all the other OSes as well. I find some love for all of them. Retro Heart!

Thank you! Appreciated :)

Super stable lol

lolll

"Designed to sink employee morale and weigh computers down like a stone"

Yeah, german translation for software sometimes … 🙄

Nope, but I‘ll have a look

I guess not. Seeing how much crippled MS-DOS 8 was, and how much effort it takes, to restore real MS-DOS mode back, it's of course way easier to take 98 SE. Windows Me doesn't really anything (except the UI refresh and some graphical tools), but was in other ways a stepback. And of course, today it's not so much an issue anymore, but doing all these hacks back then would always expose you at the risk of being broken after the next Windows patch day.

Actually, yes, me. I used to always call it „M E“, as in the german-speaking area, I never heard it any different by anyone. I guess the „Me“ thing didn‘t transport well into german.

"Meh" is probably the correct way of saying it.

@@dinitroacetylen or in german, „ne!“, which is kinda a „never in my life, thanks, but no thanks“ ;)

Yes, it's linked in the video description. You find a ready-to-run MSDOS 8 ISO on multiboot.ru.

Did you impose any particular tricks to achieve this? I never bothered about the UI too much.

​@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I think my response got deleted because I put a link in it maybe? Just do a search for 98SE2ME. Anyways, I find it easier to do the unofficial Windows 98 updates, then install ie6 which is required for the ME UI, then the me ui. I then use resource hacker to replace the start menu Banner and the winver banner(bmp files in explorer.exe and shell32.dll) the only win me system files I use are Defrag and scandiskw. Win me Defrag is much faster. I copy those in manually

This is fair, for general 90s computing Win 9x is the easiest way about it. But sometimes, you wanna watch the world burn. Or use Windows Me

@scoutkirby1764 I've tried. At least on a particular system of mine. Win me isn't friendly.

In Windows Me, yes. But be careful not to confuse it with Windows 2000, which is a different thing. Win95, Win98/SE and Windows Me all built on MS-DOS as a foundation. Windows NT/2000/XP/and everything beyond is NT-based, so in fact doesn't build on DOS. Everything up and until Windows 11 still had the 16-bit NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine), with a DOS 5 derived subset for the DOS subsystem, but this was only there for compatibility and was not a fully-featured DOS in it's own right.

I remember asking for IO.SYS from ME's Developer's Release back in 1999, to see/learn how DOS was removed, and also, I had no friends back then :P

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR yes in fact there Is a small program that allows 16 bit ntvdm programs to run on win 10

That's a very specific request. Without MSDOS.SYS processing, you still want to be able to set the default paths and options since those affect how the system will boot. The logo can't be removed (without crippling the boot process of Windows), only hidden by that option in MSDOS.SYS

@@doslogoyes but there is way to make any other msdos using the leaked sources from MSDOS 6.0 which are 21 mb and are complete.

@@asanjuas Give or take, the source code doesn't have FAT32, or Windows 95, 98 support. The boot menu is buggy in 6.0. It even lacks the important code of DoubleSpace that was part of 6.0 because of that "issue" that Microsoft ran into that eventually resulted in version 6.22

Ich nicht ;) Bin aus der Schweiz 🇨🇭

Ack 🙂 (acknowledge, like SYN / SYN-ACK / ACK in TCPs 3-way handshake)

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Ack.

Greetings, iMic! :-) For a rough PoC it was already very solid, I must say! You did a splendid job there! Adding more jelly onto it was fun, the in-place patching is now conceptually there, some localization support as well, plus the uninstaller and the missing format command. I'm hoping to properly fix the System File Protection madness next, as that's really a bugger and will get in the way when tampering around with other protected files. Let me know should you resume, I'm more than happy to help.

Can I help at all? I write embedded software (mostly in C) for a living. I don't have any experience programming on Windows (9x or NT) at all, but I'd love to help see this project through.

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks, I tried to make it at least somewhat polished before it went out. Admittedly I did get the documentation a little wrong in regards to System File Protection - what I meant to say was that it gets around the "file is in use by Windows" error dialogs that would appear when attempting a drag and drop replacement from Explorer (or a COPY replacement from DOS). SFP is where I'm currently getting stuck as well. I have another revision of the Update CD in the works to replace the aging 2.2 release ("Windows Me Update CD" on the Internet Archive), but SFP has been causing some problems when installing a large number of updates at once, particularly on fast systems. It would be brilliant if we could figure out how to create the Security Catalog files needed to install updates into place, and would open up a lot of possibilities going forward, but I wonder if this will be more difficult than it sounds. I think they were signed with Microsoft's own code signature, but I'm hazy on the details. Even so, it is Windows 9x - not the most secure platform - so there may be some kind of way around it. With SFP out of the way, we could look at tackling the low-level Windows stuff needed to make Restarting in MS-DOS Mode work properly. That might be trickier still, but if it's not possible to do, maybe there's a workaround solution that would get us most of the way there.

@@micbr508Creating the catalog file shouldn't be the big deal, but signing it 🙂 Why don't you join on github.com/gpdm/TPC-WinMe-DOSMODE I'd love going deeper into it. I'm currently working on a video on OS/2's trapdoor, and dual-booting Windows 9x and OS/2. Had Windows Me a fully working MS-DOS Mode (one, that does exit right away with the current config, not implying a reboot), then it would work as well. But no, it has to be complicated ... ;-)

@MattTrevett Here you go: mklasson.com/hexit.php

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Many thanks!

@@MattTrevettYou're welcome!

But freedos isn't compatible with win31.

MS-DOS 8 neither, at least not with 386 Extended Mode and some additional patches to IO.SYS.

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR there was a simple patch in msdos 7.10 to enable win3x support.

Ack, FreeDOS is very capable in general, and memory management is key. Although I prefer to setup my machines with contemporary software like MS-DOS, PC DOS, et all, I every so often borrow tools from FreeDOS. CTMOUSE being a very good example, because why should I spend 30k on a mouse driver, if 2k is also doing the job? :-) I'm thinking of doing a comparison between MS-DOS/PC DOS and FreeDOS in context of memory management, especially as I eventually will be doing some videos about networking, which was an absolute PITA when it came to memory consumption.

@@asanjuasAck, MS-DOS 7.x was also less crippled than MS-DOS 8 :-)

I'll have a look into at some point, for sure!

Otherwise: still good videos! Greetings from Leipzig (GDR)! Posted with my Robotron EC1834 through some self-made script.

@@msdosm4nfredOh my ... ein ex-DDR Rechner? Wir haben das ENTER Museum hier in der Schweiz, die haben zwei Robotrons in der Ausstellung, leider nur "on Display", und nicht in Betrieb. Hab so ein Ding erst einmal Live in Betrieb gesehen. Bitte gut drauf aufpassen! ;-)

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Tja, ich gehöre zu den wenigen Leuten, die das Privileg hatten, anno '89 geboren zu sein und sich besonders mit der IT-Hostorie aus dem eigenen Land auseinanderzusetzen. Meine weitere Jagd geht nach Bulgarien, wegen den Prawez-Rechnern, die sollen besonders interessant sein im RGW-Raum.

Es sei noch erwähnt, dass mein Erzeuger damit geflext hat, unschuldige Leute an der Mauer einfach abgeknallt zu haben. Dafür schäm ich mich seit meiner Geburt anno 1989. An den Robotron kam ich anderweitig per Kontakt zur Sowjetunion, mein Modell ist ein Exportmodell, welches ich wieder reimpotiert hatte. Das Original hatte keine ISA-Slots gehabt, das Modell, was ich reimportiert hatte, hat echte ISA-Slots

Inzwischen stehts auch nimmer bei mir, ich hab das Ding an ein DDR-Computermuseum gespendet, wo der Gerät besser uffgehoben ist.

The MS-DOS 7.1 distribution, which was assembled by a group of people referred to as the „China DOS Union“, is a fake product. There was never an official release of MS-DOS 7.1 by Microsoft. The DOS contained in that distribution of course is still the real thing, as these guys essentially extracted the MS-DOS 7 files from Windows 98 and bundled it to a standalone MS-DOS 7 distribution. So fake in the meaning of „not an official Microsoft product / distro“. It’s still the real MS-DOS 7.1 from Windows 98.

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks for clarifying. I was under the impression that they renamed DOS 6.22 into DOS 7.1.

Indeed!

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORbut it was the thing on your latest not published video?

Hahaha ... It's arguable wether it's too odd already to scare people away, or to make them remember. The name has a long-lasting history behind, as explained in the channel description. And that's why it is, what it is, the channel with the intentional odd spelling. Having said that, your interpretation made me laugh. I'd wonder if there's more people coming to that same conclusion. It never occured to me.

Na. Keep it.

It‘s anyway just a bit of an urban legend about he cycle IMO. It depends heavily on how and which version you count. For me, Win10 was running just fine without troubles for years, and now does Win11. I avoided Win8 like pest, but mostly for the sh*** UI.

If you count 98SE and 8.1 then it works from 95. 11 is definitely better than 10, it's faster than 10 on my Celeron tablet and very stable too, never crashed once.

Windows 95 was a great release, Windows 98 was even better. The urban legend is not true.

not really, 11 is the OS equivalent of putting a fresh coat of paint on an old rusty car without first removing the rust sure its got a brand new look, but for power users the fact that everything is held together with code ductape becomes apparent quite quickly. also 11 is just straight up missing many features 10 had like the option to change taskbar height

@tezcanaslan2877 Yeah, sometimes the video links via the YT info popups seem to not show properly. This is the previous video I did kzfaq.info/get/bejne/f9WWlMJjx9S1mXU.html You'll find it as well at the very end of the video description.

😂

Vista actually got more stable by the time SP1 had released, but ME was heavily panned and it never was fixed.

@@weegeenumberone2 Vista was a resource hog. Microsoft gave me a free license key for Ultimate and I still only used it about 3 months before downgrading to XP. Every other release of Microsoft's OS seems to suck. 8/8.1, Vista, ME. It's yet to be foreseen if 11 is as bad as the others.

I'm aware about SETVER, but that doesn't always cover all eventualities. On a boot disk, which may or may not have a CONFIG.SYS yet, there's simply no guarantee SETVER is loaded. And it's a total throwback, if you want FORMAT /S or SYS the C: drive and need to fiddle around with SETVER first. Also, if you simply copy over files, without bothering for a CONFIG.SYS yet, it's just practical to not needing to care for SETVER, especially when a FORMAT.COM or SYS.COM was taken from a previous DOS version as in this example. Also, as far as some of the demoed patches in this video are concerned, not all of them are concerning version checks, but other bypasses. So SETVER won't help there anyway. Neither won't SETVER help for things Windows DLLs to be patched for version checks, as they wouldn't care at all what SETVER says. I could give you even another example why patching is just a blunt necessity, although that's from IBM's PC DOS. When merging PC DOS 7.1, which was never a full release, with the files of PC DOS 2000 (= PC DOS 7.0), to make it a complete release, you *must* patch SETVER yourself. Because PC DOS 7.1 didn't have SETVER, and in order to make the PC DOS 7.0 SETVER working on 7.1, you must patch it. Only then you could start using SETVER, to have it fake the DOS version for the other 7.0 utilities. In the end, such patches are there to simplify things.

It depended. When running Windows Me with then-current / new hardware, staying away from legacy hardware, and thus VXD drivers sometimes dating back to Win95, then it could be very stable. Technically, Windows Me still could use the VXD drivers, and people using Windows Me as an upgrade to older boxes, that were already around with Windows 95 or Windows 98, really had a hard time.

I used Win ME from around 2000-2005 and it was really not as bad as some people claim it was. I used it precisely for Win 9x/DOS compatibility and because Win XP was quite resource intensive when it first came out.

Dude, tell me you're a hater without telling me you're a hater 😄 For real though, you're exagerrating. For many people Win XP worked very good out of the box. Without buying a new computer for it. That's (also) why sooo many people remember it so fondly. Did you install pre-release versions, or what ? For my case, I remember that in Win 98 the dialup modem was quite a chore to install the drivers for. I don't remember the details, but it was something like first installing manually (choosing from a huge list) some enumerator then doing something else, and only then adding the driver or something like that. It took multiple tries to make it work. When I upgraded to WinXP, the modem worked out of the box, I didn't had to install anything. I remember that WinXP did have higher requirements, but other than a very slow Morrowind (IIRC I had 128 MB of RAM and for WinXP they recommended 256) I don't remember being affected by it. Because of the modem part, when we upgraded to WinXP it gave us the confidence boost that it's a good OS and we never looked back, never felt the need to go back to '98 or Me. It was actually the smoothest upgrade of an OS we had back then, but I think that's more down to luck. Still, if it was SUCH a "plagued" one, luck wouldn't have matter much.

@@Winnetou17 I'll tell you I'm a hater without telling you I am a hater. I had Windows XP as my main operating system for 10 years, from 2002 to 2012. In fact I still have computers running Windows XP Professional. So yes. This clarifies why I am a "hater". Now for the history story. My family bought a brand new Dell Dimension 8100 in late 2001. It was running Windows Millennium. At the time, I didn't know anything about kernels. All I know is that Windows Millennium was the next version of Windows. I knew back then that Windows 2000 was around, but I never had a copy of it therefore I didn't bother to look into it. Anyways, all I know is that everything from my old computer migrated. Everything worked. DOS games worked, Windows games worked, CD Burning was new and was amazing to make my own audio cd, yes the system hung at times, but this was the case with my older computer running Windows 95 and 98. Now, in 2002, upgrading to Windows XP Home Edition using a coupon which came with my brand new computer. We spent the 35 dollars, got the XP Home upgrade CD from Dell, then upgraded. Everything broke. Games wouldn't run properly, DOS games hung the entire machine, hardware kept hanging the entire system, it was an absolute nightmare. I got a second hand scanner (I don't remember the model number) but it connected to the parallel port, it hung the entire system, with Windows ME it never did this. In 2003 I was told by Dell technical support that DOS games were not compatible with Windows XP. I didn't understand why. I only found out in 2005 about the DOS vs NT kernel, that Windows XP was built on NT, which is the main reason why nothing worked after the upgrade. Your story on the Dial Up mode, I can relate this to a 3rd party modem being impossible to configure in Windows 98 back in the year 2000. At one point I was afraid to reinstall Windows with the risk of losing drivers for it. I never had this experience because the Dell 8100 had the Lucent Win Modem software which configured it automatically, so it worked flawlessly both in Windows ME and Windows XP (XP had preinstalled drivers for this). It sounds like you lucked out with driver support because the dell consumer based systems were absolutely terrible in this regard when upgrading to Windows XP. Also in 2005, I deployed active directory in my environment. The reason is to have a user have their documents on each computer redirected to the server. I was disgusted how the Home Edition of Windows XP completely yanked the feature out. Windows 95 98 and ME had this feature where you could log into the domain and have My Documents redirected to the server. Microsoft sure knows how to make things completely inconvenient for consumers. Fortunately in 2004, doing a clean install of Windows XP Professional SP1 without installing the Dell bloatware, and removing older hardware like that scanner, ditching DOS programs, made Windows XP usable. We ended up dual booting Windows ME and Windows XP. There was always some charm going back to ME while keeping XP for everything else.

@@judenihal You certainly got the short stick there. In my case, we didn't use any domain features (we only had a single computer, and that one was a SH one bought in '98, it originally was from '96, but we did upgrade most of the components by the time XP came). We also didn't paid anything for the Windows itself, in that time piracy in our country (Romania) was very common. I'm sure that even companies, small ones especially, had mostly pirated software. Though it was about then when it started to diminish. Yeah, so on those fronts I certainly cannot disagree. But I don't remember having that much problem with DOS games. Probably I simply didn't played them much then, and probably got SP2 in the mean time. I don't remember. But I do remember playing Warcraft III a lot, once we got a GPU (I literally had the game installed and not running for months until we got a 3D video card, lol). Same with Quake 3, but that one I played much less, as it already kind of run its course in the prior years.

@@judenihal thank you for your comments, I don't understand all the hater-aide that gets poured on WinME, I honestly believe it comes from people who NEVER experienced it AT ALL. It was practically Win98"c" / Win98 Third edition! I got a lot of milage out of it, even used it as a server to share a DSL internet connection which was EASY to configure. People look at XP with rosey glasses and YES it was good but when people refer to "good" XP they FORGET they are refering to SP2 / SP3, not the first shipment.

It doesn‘t, except for people interested into retro tech :)

I'm an italian as well ;-) I do use EN software mostly, except sometimes when different language versions expose different behaviour, or in this case, where I decidedly wanted to test the patches and the patchset on the german version of Windows Me. Most of the time I hope the added narration and highlight segments should cover up for the context, even if the captured footage is in a different language.

@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I thought you were german from the amount of german things you had

@@tezcanaslan2877Swiss Italian descendant, to be exact, but in the german speaking of Switzerland, so no way around german.

Similar topic: you might not be aware that “crippled” isn’t something people say anymore.