I'd pick the TNT2. Geforce drivers (particularily newer ones, even as far back as 2001) can be unstable for legacy gaming especially on Win9x, and if you've got a 90s processor, it wouldn't really make a difference in performance anyway, unless you wanted to play Quake3, or any modern-era game that only requires hardware TNL to function (most 2001-2003 games)

Well...

I was thinking of basing it around a p233mmx or ppro 200. I haven't decided yet. I am still learning about the various chipsets and features available for supporting those chips back then. What I figure out there will determine the CPU family.

I was kind of oblivious to the way it all worked then. My main PC was a packard bell p75 with all budget level crap it had built in. That was an upgrade from an old 386 my dad had that I pretty much played only flight sims on. The pentium handled what I wanted to play just fine, but I could never get falcon 3.0 or Wing Commander to work on it. That's when I first started learning about the differences about clock speeds affecting older games and such.

Anyway:
~200mhz Pentium/Pro
~64mb Ram
8g HD or two
Whichever Vid card of the three
SB 16 or Awe, I have too look into these
24x CD

Any other suggestions? I read here that the s3 virge/dx in the stealth 3d pro is pretty nice for compatibility, but that the tnt2 trumps it for the windows side of things.

I've had good experiences with S3 and Ark based chipset PCI gfx cards, other chipset cards might cause minor troubles like glitches in the gfx and jerky scrolling and poor CGA/EGA compatability.

If you plan to play early 90's games you'll run into serious speed problems if you plan to play games like Ultima prior to sequel 8 and Wing Commander 1, 2 + Privateer
A slow 486 or 386 is best for those games

Well, like I said, it'd be mostly for CD-based multimedia games. I never got into ultima or it's style of RPG and I didn't get into Wing Commander until 3, which has windows versions.

I guess I need to rethink this a little. I want to recreate the feeling I had when I first got that packard bell. It came bundled with the Journeyman Project, Silent Steel, and a bunch of those whiz-bang multimedia titles that were supposed to change the world. I kind of want to bring back that feeling that anything that came on a CD just *might* prove awesome and mind-blowing.

Those few games already mentioned really did that. Journeyman Project was visually beautiful and the music has always stayed in my mind. Toonstruck was cool. It was sort of a roger rabbit type world with christopher lloyd instead of bob hoskins, but funnier and less serious.

Wing Commander 3 outright blew my mind when I first played it. It was a movie that I got to play in and decide the plot of...sort of.

So, I'm guessing I'm looking more for an overall Dos/Win9x setup. Older games will not be played on this rig. I'll build up a 386 or 486 for those. It would be nice to finally be able to play falcon 3.0 the right way.

Any of those cards should work ok for most things. The S3 card will most likely be the most compatible of them, but also the slowest. And by that I don't mean to say that S3 PCI cards are significantly slower than most of their contemporaries, just that GeForce/TNT2 are exceptionally fast for DOS.

GeForce and TNT cards can be pretty capable DOS cards too, in my experience. It's just that S3 was super popular so most games were tested to work with them, unlike NVIDIA cards that came years later.

OMG journeymen project. I got that with my first PC (a packard bell 🤣).. it was probably one of the first PC games I beat. Man i was a young one. Unless your looking for something with real 3D rendering sounds like the tnt2 is the way to go. As I recall the geforce4, being an MX is actually on par or slower than a geforce2. Just get your self little more ram and sounds like you'll be in retro heaven.

So my girlfriend has this old p2 rig in her closet that she used to use as a linux box. I ripped it apart and took note of what was in there. This is what I found:

Create LXE-AT 440ex/lx mobo ( I can't find anything other than base specs on this thing. Would anyone happen to have a manual?)
p2-300 with the full 512k cache
64mb ram
No-Name-Brand SiS 6326(I think?) AGP card
built-in sound of some kind, I couldn't find a detailed list of the components on the board.

I know it's mostly useless, but the case is really cool. AT with a turbo button. I think I may rig case lighting to that turbo button....