Well.....if you buy a fast machine you can run

System Shock
Crusader

on DosBox just fine....

As for Tomb Raider there's always Dgvoodoo or GliDos (If you want Hires textures).

Can't really help you with the other games.

Of course if you just want to build an old machine then that's fine but for alot of games it's not really necessary.

I ended up getting used Asus P2B motherboard. It has PCI, AGP, and ISA, supports a lot of different CPU frequencies and types, known to be very stable and compatible. It's not really old skool but with ISA video (Tseng ET4000), SBPro2, and LAPC-I it is pretty good approximation.

Thx for the input guys. I tried using dgvoodoo on tombraider, i set it up and tried to run, but after the intro it shows a frame of the main menu and crashes 😒 . I tried fiddling with all the options but still doesnt work. I also tried it on f-18 Korea, it did the 3d part somewhat right but the picture of the cockpit is invisible except for traces of the hud and other indicators. It requires 3dfx to run, unless you want software rendering, which let me tell you, looks graphically inferior to Falcon 3.0 (no textures w/o 3dfx) so LoL. If you got it to work with Tomb Raider can you tell me what version you have and what switches you have on ? thx in advance.

vasyl wrote:

I ended up getting used Asus P2B motherboard. It has PCI, AGP, and ISA, supports a lot of different CPU frequencies and types, known to be very stable and compatible. It's not really old skool but with ISA video (Tseng ET4000), SBPro2, and LAPC-I it is pretty good approximation.

🤣 an ISA video card in a system with AGP slots... That's like ripping the whole fuel injection system out of a modern car and putting in a carburetor instead 😉

Or, like hooking up a 1950s black-and-white TV to a DVD player!

You don't know the whole story: that ISA video card is connected to Dell widescreen 24" LCD monitor! 🤣

Here is the system I would build for the games you mentioned:

CPU: AMD K6 or Intel Pentium MMX (somewhere between 166 and 233 MHz)
I'd prefer the K6, because it has no locked multipliers and can be clocked down to 100 MHz if needed. Note that some games reaching back to 1990 may have problems with Pentium class CPUs, not only because of the higher clock speed, but also because they sometimes used non-standard 386/486 tricks which will crash a Pentium.

Board: A brand name Socket 7 ATX board with the Intel 430TX chipset.
The TX is one of the least problematic and most versatile chipsets I've ever used. The FSB range is 50 to 66 MHz (some boards go as high as 83 MHz). Supports SDRAM, UDMA on the IDE controller, and the ATX versions often come with USB and PS/2 connectors.

Memory: 64MB SDRAM
More than that wouldn't be cached anyway. Plenty for DOS and about right for Windows, if all you do with it is playing games.

Graphics: 3dfx Voodoo Banshee
Super-fast framebuffer and Glide support, very compatible with older games. Works well with UniVBE.

Sound: ISA SoundBlaster 16 or AWE32/64. Wavetable card recommended.

Storage: 30 GB harddisk, CD-ROM drive (16x minimum)

OS: Windows 95 OSR2, using the integrated DOS7 for DOS games

vasyl wrote:

You don't know the whole story: that ISA video card is connected to Dell widescreen 24" LCD monitor! 🤣

AAAHRGH! 😵
Let me guess: 100 thin film transistors to display one pixel? 🙄

Close... actually, even little more in 320x200 mode. The interesting part is that the display has 16x10 ratio so pixels are actually square in 320x200!

Banshee does not work with the first voodoo games that have statically compiled glide in the executable.