DOS, full potential and no emulation? Drop the Live. Drop the FX5200. Drop the motherboard (it lacks ISA slots, which matter 400% for DOS gaming at "full potential" when you have a real ISA Sound Blaster in use, rather than running into many edge cases and problems with SBLive's Soundblaster emulation TSR)

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

the ultimate Windows 98 gaming PC to play some retro PC and DOS games at their fullest potential.

Start by deciding specifically what you want to play. A single Windows 98 PC will probably not play every "retro PC and DOS game" at its "fullest potential".

I know many people will just say "why not use emulation" because similar to consoles, its better to play on the real hardware.

Console games were generally written for exactly one specific hardware configuration, which emulators approximately replicate. PC games were written for many different hardware configurations, none of which can be said to be the "one true configuration"; accordingly, emulation can be just as good as any particular hardware configuration you can come up with.

Motherboard - PCCHIPS M825LU

PCChips boards are notoriously unreliable and you should consider an alternative if available.

PC Chips motherboards are junk. I think the Live is ok through as long as you are focusing on Late DOS to Late Windows 98 games. I'd do an Athlon XP or a Tualatin rather then an original socket Athlon. Video card is i fine, but I'd rather do a Geforce 4 Ti.

I quite like the system , but as previously stated I would change the motherboard, PCCHIPS weren't known for quality.

I'm mainly focusing on late DOS games and early Windows games. I'm using the PCCHIPS MOBO mainly because I got it for free from another PC build.

I also have a spare Slot 1 Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz but I have no motherboard for it. Would a Pentium III be a better processor for the build?

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

I also have a spare Slot 1 Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz but I have no motherboard for it. Would a Pentium III be a better processor for the build?

Compared to what you have in mind, for sure.

Like I said: it depends entirely on what you specifically want to play. 800 MHz is much too fast for some games, and much too slow for other games. What is a "late DOS game" to you? What is an "early Windows game" ?

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

I also have a spare Slot 1 Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz but I have no motherboard for it. Would a Pentium III be a better processor for the build?

This depends on the usage case. In SSE heavy workloads, I've seen a PIII-866 (i815) outperform a Tbird-1333 (KT133A). For example, decoding an 852x480 H.264 video stream in software. PIII-866 can handle it; Tbird is quite jittery.

However, for DOS and Win9x games, I'd imagine that your 1GHz Athlon would outperform the PIII-800.

What you have is a rather good system for Win9x. Whether it is a good DOS system very much depends on the games you are planning to play. Anything from before 1992-93 is a complete gamble. Late DOS games that don't mind running under a Windows DOS box shouldn't give you much trouble. There are some exceptions though. For example, Duke3D and Shadow Warrior will crash on most PCI audio cards when the "echo" effect is used in some levels. There is a patch available to disable the echo and prevent the crash.

An FX5200 is a decent card for your purpose, but were outperformed by the Ti4200, their predecessor, and used later drivers that may impact compatibility with some early games.

The SB Live! is also a fine card for the most part. They offer fairly good SBPro emulation and allow using loaded soundfonts on General MIDI with DOS games run from within Windows. However their OPL3 emulation is very poor, worse than CQM. A Turtle Beach Santa Cruz or Aureal Vortex2 are both steps upwards to consider, as well as a YMF-724 card if good OPL is a priority, as they have a genuine integrated OPL3 core.

If you end up running into any weird technical issues, blame the motherboard first. The quality and reliability of anything by PCChips is... inconsistent, to put it lightly.

Since the computer I listed did not turn out, I have a backup. I will be using a Dell Dimension 4100 I got for free from a friend. This PC features an Intel Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz and has 256 MBs of ram. It also has a Nvidia Riva TNT2 graphics card. The unit works just fine and I've just got done cleaning dust out of it. Will this work better for my need? Oh and DOS games are not required mainly Windows games from about 1995 to 2001 although it would be nice to have DOS compatibility.

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

Will this work better for my need?

I've said it twice already: what, exactly, is your need? Windows games changed substantially between 1995 and 2001. What might be adequate for Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure might be wholly inadequate for, oh, Anachronox.

I would agree with the above suggestion of a GeForce Ti, as an FX5200 really is not a very good card.

I would like to be able to play games like Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Quake III Arena, Doom as well as other popular games from the late 90's.

I think I should emphasize that Quake III Arena is available on Steam and there is really no benefit whatsoever to using it on a Windows 98 machine; there is no need to "use emulation" there, if I'm not mistaken. Likewise, the "fullest potential" of Grim Fandango would likely be achieved with the recent Remastered edition. Doom has source ports like Chocolate Doom which are based on the original code and use the original assets – there is no need for a Windows 98 machine for that either. Half-Life is a matter of some debate.

Anyway, yes, those should probably all work just fine on the system you describe.

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

I would like to be able to play games like Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Quake III Arena, Doom as well as other popular games from the late 90's.

I'd say your machine is a start. It will work, but it won't do anything a modern machine can't do. If you want to make these games look and sound different, here are some tips:

- look for a Voodoo card. Voodoo 2 cards are PCI and only produce 3D. That means, you need another card to take care of 2D and your Nvidia should work nicely. However, V2 can be too slow for Quake 3, so you might want to get a Voodoo 3. That is an integrated 2D and 3D card and you can get it either in PCI or AGP. It's also somewhat period-correct for your machine.

Voodoo cards use Glide technology as opposed to DirectX or vanilla OpenGL (I'm simplifying a bit here) and many late 90s are specifically written for these chips. That means you can get more performance and/or additional graphical effects.

- look for an Aureal Vortex-based sound card that provides A3D 2.0. The most popular is Diamond Monster Sound mx300. A3D is a technology that gives you dimensional sound without a 5.1 system.

Half-Life is an example of a game that supports both A3D and Glide, so this could be interesting to experience/compare.

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

Since the computer I listed did not turn out, I have a backup. I will be using a Dell Dimension 4100 I got for free from a friend. This PC features an Intel Pentium III clocked at 800 MHz and has 256 MBs of ram. It also has a Nvidia Riva TNT2 graphics card. The unit works just fine and I've just got done cleaning dust out of it. Will this work better for my need? Oh and DOS games are not required mainly Windows games from about 1995 to 2001 although it would be nice to have DOS compatibility.

That's going to be quite a bit better in terms of stability and reliability, as Dell used OEM Intel boards in those machines. It is also the machine I use for my Win9x games, so I can tell you right off the bat it's great for that purpose. If you got ahold of a faster Coppermine P3 (up to 1000MHz) it will plug right in, no configuration required.

For many people a lot of the appeal of building a Win9x rig comes from being able to run 3Dfx Glide games in their original format. Quite a few games, Unreal most notably, run and look better using Glide. For that purpose, on the cheap I would recommend a AGP Voodoo 3 2000 or 3000, they go for about $25-40 on eBay. Both offer approximately the same performance, so just get whichever one you can find cheaper.

Jorpho wrote:

I think I should emphasize that Quake III Arena is available on Steam and there is really no benefit whatsoever to using it on a Windows 98 machine; there is no need to "use emulation" there, if I'm not mistaken. Likewise, the "fullest potential" of Grim Fandango would likely be achieved with the recent Remastered edition. Doom has source ports like Chocolate Doom which are based on the original code and use the original assets – there is no need for a Windows 98 machine for that either. Half-Life is a matter of some debate.

If he wanted to run these games on a modern PC he would have done so by now. It's not dissimilar asking why you'd use a 486 DOS machine when DOSBox runs everything fine. Some people just prefer the original hardware.

There's just something about building a machine like this that emulation just can't replicate.

Those specs are better off as an EAX W9X gaming rig as Vista dropped hardware accel'd sound and etc.

ElementalChaos wrote:

It's not dissimilar asking why you'd use a 486 DOS machine when DOSBox runs everything fine. Some people just prefer the original hardware.

But it can be easily argued that DOSBox is fundamentally different from a 486 DOS machine. Why should running Quake III on Windows 98 be different from running Quake III with the same settings on Windows 10? It's not like we're talking about "emulation" there.

You have a reasonably good point about using 3Dfx Glide.

GilboyNerd1997 wrote:

There's just something about building a machine like this that emulation just can't replicate.

So it's not about "playing some retro PC and DOS games at their fullest potential", is it? You might as well just stick with whatever hardware you have and decide for yourself whether it has that "something that emulation just can't replicate".