I got a new (to me) laptop this week: the ThinkPad R32 from 2001 in the 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 256MiB RAM configuration.
It arrived running the Dutch version of XP SP3 and both NOD32 and Norton, from the 5400 rpm Travelstar drive.
I replaced the mechanical hard drive with a mSATA SSD on an IDE adaptor caddy. Then I booted 9x QuickInstall from a floppy and imaged with Windows 98.
Then off to install some classic games and programs!
At least that is the romanticized version of events. In reality I spent a whole evening debugging why I couldn't get anything to boot.
The BIOS doesn't support booting from USB, so I was using the Plop bootloader to chainload.
This sort of worked, in that the next bootloader would start, and that could load the kernel and initrd, but then farther along in the boot USB I/O would fail, grinding everything to a halt.
I eventually figured out the USB stick I was using was too new, and it was handling some USB 1.0 state differently than the USB controller was expecting.
Switched to an ancient USB stick I found lying around and things worked!
I think I'd call getting to this point "pain and suffering" as softpipe slowly tries to render the UI.
Plasma's UI is much more responsive in Wayland, I just can't launch any applications.
The R32 had a SKU with wireless, but this model did not come equipped, but it did retain the Mini-PCI (not Mini-PCIe) slot.
I picked up an Atheros AR922X Mini-PCI card and the flat antennas just arrived.
The BIOS has an allowlist of wireless cards, which the AR922X is much too new. I found a firmware with the check disabled, but the author notes the BIOS still has the radio disable pin set.
Fortunately the AR922X seems to ignore this pin, as the radio works.
Unfortunately, it seems there are no Windows 98 drivers for this card. I guess I should look for a slightly older 802.11b/g card instead?
@terinjokes my only personal success story with WPA2 (i know not the same, but that was my requirement and ends up being the newest standard i could find) under 98 was the DWL-G630. still pretty easy to find, both units i found online turned out to be still sealed
@terinjokes i see now that there are multiple chips this card can have depending on revision, i can take a look at which specific one i have later
@mavica_again Based in the INF file I have for the XP driver, they used the same driver for a lot of devices. I wonder if I can find win98 driver from D-Link for a chipset in the same family, then just hack up the INF file.
@mavica_again I skimmed through every D-Link driver across their entire product range (thanks for having a browsable file server!) and found many references to the 98/ME driver in inf files, the driver itself was never included.
@mavica_again I did craft an inf file to match the driver from the preceding chipset, in the hopes it was close enough to bring up the card, but alas nothing.
I'd probably just replace it with a card that works well in 98 and XP.
@mavica_again Based on the driver downloads all three revisions have Windows 98 drivers, revision C is also an Atheros chipset.