Hmm. In 486 news I've managed to
follow this guide to install what essentially amounts to a Windows 3.11 (not for Workgroups) virtual-machine under Windows 98SE. Of course, Control Panel GPF'ing on the special mouse driver and one of the pieces of software I actually wanted to mess with requiring 386 enhanced mode -- the VM can only run in standard mode since, hey, Win9x is already running in 386enh, and it doesn't like to share -- led to me putting together some scripts to swap configuration files around for DOS-specific ones and then providing a proper environment (correct PATH, WINPKT loaded for rudimentary and slow but crucially working networking) for loading Windows 3.11 directly in 386enh mode.
I also had to patch WIN386.EXE and IO.SYS to accomplish this, but in the end I had a working setup that... was completely useless, but fun. I call it useless because the amount of software I've even seen that will work under 3.x but not 9x can be counted on one hand, and due to the lack of 32-bit file/disk access, it's also much
slower than 9x when it's actually doing stuff. It being more unstable is also a given.
I went through and updated some of the decisions I'd made when originally putting it together, such as remounting the battery pack with command strips this time instead of velcro with perished adhesive. I also disconnected and disabled the game port on my super IO card, since (I didn't know this when I originally put it all together) most MIDI cables that hook to the game port have a passthrough for a joystick/gamepad, since MIDI just uses some otherwise unused pins on the port. Now I don't have to potentially deal with those conflicting, since they were at the same address.
Of course I managed to completely screw something up -- I caught the IDE ribbon cable in some metal and sheared it to the point that it does not work anymore. And of course I had no suitable spares, since the way I had it set up was with a very long cable as it had to go to some awkward spots. I tried to cobble together something with an already-used but salvaged connector off of another cable, and a rather long but uninterrupted cable, crimping it with just a bog standard pair of channel locks. It seemed to work at first, but it's behaving rather strangely -- IO is fine for the most part under DOS, but Windows loads extremely slowly and calculating the free space also takes an order of magnitude longer. This is enough for me to just bite the bullet and grab some fresh cables off ebay, and an extension lead to go where it needs to go that needed the extra length. But I have to wait for those!
Speaking of stuff I had to wait for, the PS1 has a fresh laser mech now and it boots everything I throw at it without issue. Now I finally have a reason to go through with that RGB mod that I'd been putting off, now that I have all the parts.