Baby's First Windows 98 Laptop
A few days ago, a garage sale took place in my town. Usually, such a small city would have a relatively small amount of deals of interest, when it comes to video games at least. Normalfags would likely be delighted by the endless amount of kitchenware, clothings and toys/board games for toddlers people in my town offer. If you feel like collecting movies or music, there are many offers for a low price: vinyls for 1€/piece, CDs and DVDs you can have for 5€ in a bundle of 10 (I could've gotten all of Columbo's 4th season for 3€), VHS tapes no one cares about you could get a whole box of for 5€, 50 writable CDs for a similar price, all sorts of cables (Composite, Péritel, VGA, ...) the sellers have found in their attic and will put in a random bag... You get the idea.
Clueless normies (this umbrella term will have to do since there isn't really any distinct generation, ethnicity or gender for the sellers belonging in the category, it's 80% of the people present if not more) will keep discarding their collections at ridiculous prices as the media formats they own become either obsolete or to the least less convenient than going digital. Thankfully, this also applies to game-unrelated electronics: you can find "vintage" vinyl players for 30€, some people sell VCRs/VHS players for 3€. Surprisingly enough, I've rarely seen a CRT, likely too heavy and inconvenient to move around as the sellers have a limited space to put all their belongings into. LCD TVs and monitors on the other hand were all the trend this year, I've seen at least a dozen, most under 50€, no matter how big or small, new or old.
There is a sub-category of normies that could either help you out or scam you depending on how knowledgeable you are on electronics and how much you're willing to try your luck: ethnic merchants. Those guys will have a seemingly infinite supply of cheap/broken phones, tablets, calculators, laptops and sometimes even video game consoles. It's no use asking them whether anything works, they would usually not even know the use of anything they're selling. A friend of mine got his hands on a Fullset Wii with a balance board, 3 controllers, 2 nunchuks, a bunch of plastic extensions for Wii Sports, and even a few games. 50€ for the whole package (which ended up going for 30 after a minute of talking). When I tried my luck with such merchants a few years ago, I acquired an xbox one controller for 10€ that never worked as it seemingly required a firmware update only a console could distribute, you can't always win.
Fun fact: I know exactly how those people operate, as my father himself hoards many electronics in our house in hopes of selling them at a higher price, or finding a way to make business with them. My office has a stack of 3 cheap projectors and a laser printer. We have two more printers upstairs, and a lot of broken laptops that could be brought back to life with a mere battery/hard drive replacement. Some random cameras as well, though I haven't seen those ever since we moved out.
For video games, things get more complicated. A new category of sellers makes their entry: "professionals". They will look for good offers on Leboncoin/eBay or even other garage sales, acquire a coveted "retro" item there, and sell it at a higher price to get a margin. If you see a seller with a customized tent featuring their name and phone number on it, you'd likely not find anything worth its price. Unfortunately, these sellers tend to also be the ones with the most interesting offers. This year, I saw a Gamecube, bundled with two controllers, for 80€. The previous years, I'd see copies of Gamecube games everyone owns (think Mario Sunshine or Wind Waker) being sold for 40€ if not more. The RETRO factor is barely escapable.
With normies, you can find a load of inexpensive 6-7th gen games, most of which would be a variation of FIFA, Call of Duty, or Uncharted. PC games are as widespread and inexpensive as DVDs, you could get your hands on a copy of Quake 3 for 50 cents if you feel like it. I've never found a copy of NieR in my town, but at least 5 years ago I got my hands on a copy of Eternal Sonata for 3€. I had also acquired an Xbox 360 for 10€ about half a decade ago, the seller claimed it wouldn't display anything on launch but an HDMI cable was all I needed to get it to work.
Video game accessories are the category you can easily hit a jackpot in. White mothers can't help but get rid of all the "toys" their (now grown-up) children don't use any longer. A wired X-Plorer Guitar that usually goes for 100€ if not more online? 5€! A DJ Hero fullset? 5€ as well! An almost never used Logitech G27, with all the cables and accessories? 15€!!!! Sometimes it almost feels like you'd be scamming those people by striking such good deals.
There is one final category I haven't introduced yet, but hinted towards in the previous paragraphs. I shall refer to them as the "socially castrated nerds". They have what it takes to be the same as professionals and sell their belongings at a ridiculous price, but they won't. They're not separating themselves from their beloved electronics and games for the sake of making a quick buck, but because of external normalfagged circumstances. They have a job, a kid, a wife, or they move out perhaps. And so, they need to dispose of some belongings to keep their social situation at a comfort.
There was a pretty old guy, probably in his 60s, who was selling 4 laptops this year. Their common point was that they all had 1GB of RAM at best, no GPU, and barely 100GB of memory if not less. They were old but functioning. Sometimes the battery would be thrown away, making the laptop unusable without its power supply. When I asked the man why he's selling all of these little gems at such a low price and in such a decent state, he earnestly told me I'll "understand the day I get (my) own wife", his didn't appreciate the cluttered look of his office, what a shame. He didn't seem to mind it too much, in fact he seemed happy that someone who looks competent enough to make good use of an old computer got his hands on it. And so, this is how I got my hands on this little gem.
This bad boy's specs are:
While Windows XP is a nice system I know by heart, I wanted to use this laptop as a machine to easily run DOS games with. Granted, it's easy to do that with something like DOSBOX no matter the OS, but I wanted to go the step beyond and natively be able to run Win98-era Doujin games, as many of them would refuse to run even under Windows 2000. I also wanted a machine to "natively" test some projects I plan on writing under Allegro 4 with, so there you have it. Some of said Doujin games would only run on a Japanese OS, so I thought wise to use a Japanese copy of Windows 98 SE. This is when the CD-Rs come to play, I was able to burn an ISO from the Internet Archive and get the installer running in no time. I assumed there wouldn't be much changes to make if the computer runs XP without any trouble, if only I had known.
After a bit of googling, it turned out Win98 could use two types of Hard Drive addressing: CHS, or LBA. I didn't really care much for the details, but it was said that the BIOS could have the wrong settings. So I changed my settings from Auto to Manual, and gave the biggest possible values for the CHS fields, which did the trick. Apparently, Windows 98 decides whether it'll read the disk with CHS or LBA by itself, depending on the partition type it detects, which defaulted to CHS in my case (I don't understand how since I opted for the large hard drive setup). I formatted the hard drive once more, this time with an English W98 install CD to make sure I understand everything I'm doing, I'm sure I'll figure something for the doujins...
One thing I didn't expect to struggle with, as VirtualBox would abstract and rid us of the issue, was the OS' inability to read any USB device, no matter if it's a Mouse, a Keyboard, a Controller or a Thumb Stick. This meant that my only way to install any new driver or software was to burn a CD with all the files I need, then copy/run whatever I'd have to, good thing I have 50 of those discs (well, 45 at the time of writing). Thankfully, the laptop's integrated keyboard and trackpad still worked as intended, so I could at least navigate through the file explorer/control panel and attempt installing drivers after burning discs from another PC.
The first driver I'd install was a generic GPU driver. The one Microsoft installed by default only supported 16-color 640x480, with the VESA drivers I was finally able to get 32-bit colors and 1024x768. I would then spend a whole evening hoarding then installing all sorts of drivers and service packs in hopes that one of them would support USB. One of them did the trick, I don't even remember which one. It could've been the Unattended WIN98SE ISO that I accidentally ran over my current install, making it an unstable Frankenstein monstrosity in the process.
After trying to install the community service pack 3.66 and some "memory optimizations", my PC would BSOD upon having an USB device inserted, and hang with glitched graphics if I tried to open any program. It's time to start over.
Well, since I've burned the Unattended ISO, I might as well use it the intended way and reinstall Windows98 from zero with it. It supposedly preinstalls all the drivers I could dream of: USB, FAT32, Ethernet,... Let's hope so.
July 4th, 2026. The Windows 98 install kept posing more and more problems with each attempt at making it work. The graphic drivers wouldn't allow me to launch even a 2D game, there were no functioning audio drivers either. Running Japanese games was not possible as any filename written in moonrunes would be deemed unreadable and be rejected. USB support is so unreliable I would still resort to burning CDs to transfer files and drivers over. I admit my total defeat. It was a run, not even a good one, but it's time for me to go back to something saner. So long, Windows 98. Hello again, Windows NT.