Hacker News Reader

Win98SE was the final usable Win9x version and the most stable version of them all.

There's a crapload of late 90s / early 00s Windows games that isnt compatible with modern Windows, so running or emulating Win9X is really the only way of accessing them.

If you are doing Win9X today, you would only be using Win98SE or you're doing it wrong.

And let's not mention Windows Millenium again.

View on HN

One of the big changes with ME was cutting out DOS mode as much as they could, and if you're doing a system for retro computing then it's hard to see why you'd constrain what it's capable of. If you don't need that and you've blacklisted 95/98 then I don't see why you wouldn't go for win2k onwards as it'll be a lot easier to work with, but it's a different animal.

Yes, agree on Window Me. It's not a lot of use for a retro gaming system by default. It's not too difficult to rollback some of the changes and re-enable the ability to exit to MS-DOS 7, but it is extra steps for not much gain.

IMO, the main reason to run Windows Me over Windows 98 SE is if one likes the Windows 2000-style shell updates that were bundled into Me. Me also has a more mature network stack and some other updates ported over from the 2K kernel. If one likes those features then by all means - re-enable DOS mode and it's a decent alternative to 98 SE.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com