http://everquest.allakhazam.com/story.html?story=5720

Try this then.

or this

https://techreport.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20742

It has 9c installed. Its not a dx problem despite dsetup.dll being the dll file for dx. Its where p99 hides their anti cheat spyware that reads your memory. Their software isn't compatible with windows98. As I said the game launches just fine running the unaltered dll from the directx installer but their server detects the missing software and gives an error after login.

Altered dsetup.dll most likely links against one of Microsoft's C/C++ libraries ("msvc redistributable") from long after they stopped supporting win98. Depends on the compiler the devs use, essentially. For comparison, winXP was no longer supported by default with MS's 2012 compiler (iirc).

Lobby the devs to dig up an ancient compiler, make any tweaks necessary to the code for compatibility, and go out of their way to compile a special version of dsetup.dll every patch just for you. That is your only option short of logging in on another server instead.

Perhaps a bit of a necro-post here, but I just ran into this issue myself (p99v60). I totally understand the fact that folks may not want to have to compile dependencies for very old Operating Systems (like Windows 98SE in my and OP's case), but it does kinda stink that I can't enjoy the experience of the Legends servers due to how dsetup.dll is built. Maybe there's a solution with KernelEX, but I don't want to go down that path if I don't have to. If there's anything I could self-serve (compile my own dll or whatever), I'd be very open to that