Keep in mind that my machine was fairly new at the time having built it Christmas 1998.

-AOpen AX6B+ 440BX board
-Pentium II 400Mhz
-64MB RAM
-ATI All-in-Wonder paired with a 4MB voodoo 1 card (couldn't afford a new card when I built the machine, later got a Matrox Marvel G400TV)
-SB Live! soundcard
-3Com PCI NIC
-10GB HD

It played the games of the day pretty well. Could have done even better with a voodoo 2.

WE just bought a new PC in 1998:

Pentoum 2 266MHz (Klamath)
Chaintech 6LTM2 motherboard (i440LX chipset)
S3 Virge GX2 AGP card (a horrible card, I wanted a 3dfx but we got that instead)
ESS SOLO 1938 sound card
32MB SDRAM
3.2GB Hard Drive
Windows 98

I was stuck with that for a few years. I wished we'd waited a bit and got a BX-chipset motherboard so we could upgrade to a Pentium 3 🙁 The board we had wouldn't even run Coppermine celerons.

Mmm. I was about 13 at the time.

Start of 1999

486 DX/2 66MHz
12MB Ram
VLB Video Card
120MB + 200MB HDDs
4x CD-ROM
ISA Sound Card
Windows 95

End of 1999

Pentium 133
24MB Ram
2MB S3 Trio PCI or I might have already "upgraded" to a 4MB SiS 6326 PCI
Brand new 6.4GB HDD
Windows 98

Most of the hardware was free 😀

In 1998 I bought a whole new system.

My old Pentium 133 from 1996 didn't cut it anymore, so I had to buy a new system.

I ended up with a K6-2 333. At first it used the old Matrox Mystique + Voodoo1 from the P133, but I replaced the V1 with a Voodoo2 8MB pretty soon.

A few months later (in 1999) I upgraded to a Voodoo3 2000.

Pretty much everyone around me had a PentiumII and nobody took my precious K6-2 serious. Whenever that happened I shoved some 3DNow Benchmarkes under their noses and they'd shut up for a while until they figured out that they could still crush me at games without 3dnow support *g*
But seriously: I really liked the K6-2 back then. Of course it wasn't as fast as the PentiumII, but it was the best I could afford with my limited funds.

I think a PII 266 with a decent GPU would still be useable for most games from 1999.
Heck, I can play a lot of games from 1999 on my PentiumMMX with a Voodoo1, so a PII with a V2 or V3 should perform adequately. It won't be a high end system though...so it depends what your definition of good is 😉

Had a Compaq Presario with an AMD K6-233, 32MB RAM and a 3.2GB Quantum Bigfoot CX. It was slow as custard and then the cache module died which made it almost unusable.

I had a system using some newer and older components from a previous system:
K6-2 / 400 at 83 MHz x 5.5 on a SIS5591 based mainboard, as all clocks ran in sync, PCI was at 41 MHz and AGP at 83 Mhz.
128 MB SDRAM, I got only this stick running with some weird timings.
ELSA Victory Erazor Riva128, Voodoo2 SLI (requiring a slightly shifted CPU cooler), Guillemot Maxi Sound 64 Home Studio, Primax Altrasound. Some Realtek network card 8029 or 8139.
HDD was some IBM DTTA 8.4 GB and IBM DLNA 15 GB I think, OS running was NT4.

http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/ga586sg.jpg
As you can see this board was really working a long time.

http://mail.lipsia.de/%7Eenigma/neu/pics/elsa … tory_erazor.jpg

I bought my first PC (as opposed to family PC bought by my father) in summer 1999:
- Intel 333MHz Deschute Pentium II on a 440BX Motherboard
- 64MB RAM (later changed to 128)
- Intel 740 (later changed to Riva TNT, later completed with 12MB Voodoo 2)
- 6.4GB HDD, 32X CDROM
- 15 Inch CRT SCreen

I think I had a p2/400 .... or the p200mmx before it , can't remember

Mine's very similar to sunaiac's. I built this in late 1998 after my friend showed me Action Quake 2 through a Voodoo2.. it was game over for my checkbook at that point:
- Pentium II 350
- Intel SE440BX motherboard
- 64MB PC100
- 6.4GB WD HDD
- RivaTNT 16MB AGP
- 3DFX Voodoo2 12MB
- 40X CD-ROM

I can remember struggling to choose between the smoothness of the Voodoo2 and the richness of the 32-bit RivaTNT when games supported both Glide and OpenGL/DirectX..

My Mom thought the computer was pure evil back then. I mean, she still acts reluctantly around them, not that anyone cares.

So I had no hardware at all. So sad.

My computer back then was my very 1st computer:
- A Pentium 2 350
- 128Meg SDRAM
- TNT (Diamond Viper 550)
- Soundblaster 128 PCI
- Iirc a 40x CDROM drive

And a 15in CRT

Yup, PII 266, ATI All-in-Wonder Pro, Ensoniq AudioPCI, 8 GB hard drive, much like the aforementioned.

Well lucky me, I still happen to have the receipts of my 1999 build in it's Abit motherboard box. I made the build in March, even have the prices of what I gave for some.

Abit BX6 REV.2 440BX - $115
Intel Celeron 300A - $85 > ran at 450
GlobalWIN Slot 1 cooler > twin fan
64MB SDRAM PC100 8ns - $86
Voodoo 3 - $190 > picked this up on release day
Diamond Sonic Impact S90 - $27
WD Caviar 10.2GB ATA/66
Promise ATA/66 controller card
Toshiba 2nd Generation DVD/CD-ROM - $54
Enlight Case EN-3237
...and bought a HP CD-Wiriter Plus 8100i 4x/2x/24x and also bumped my RAM up to 128mb sometime in '99.

Too poor back then to have a rig and didn't begin to have interest until a few years later. Been making up for it ever since.

Lucky guys... I was still using a 166mmx. I remember really wanting a Pentium II at the time cause most games were really choking on the MMX. Kept using this system until 2000, and then sold it to a thrift store.

Thanks for all the replays very cool to see what everyone was using. I guess it's only fair I chime in as well. I was using a 450Mhz P II ordered brand new in the fall of 1998, had DVD and all.

The computer I was using back in 1999 was hopelessly outdated. It was my father's old Packard Bell Legend 316SX I showed here (15 posts down): Retro Rig Photo Thread

Back then, it had the following specs:

-AMD 386SX 25MHz
-4MB of RAM
-20MB hard drive
-Integrated Oak Technologies graphics card
-PC Speaker only (no sound card in this thing whatsoever)
-Packard Bell PCB-302 Rev. 00 motherboard with ACC Micro chipset
-3.5-inch floppy drive, no CD-ROM drive
-Two OSes: MS-DOS v6.22 along with Windows 3.1

Pentium II 233, 96MBs of PC100, a 3dfx Voodoo Banshee, an Awe32. Win95 OSR2

1999 was insane as I was actually swapping a lot of friend's cards trying to find the best performance combo. Getting the Voodoo3 wasn't until later

This machine still "lives" today as a retro 3d capture rig 😀

1999 was the year my family finally got an actual PC to replace our Mac, early that February. Spent an arm and a leg on it too. At the beginning of the year, we still had a Macintosh Performa 600 - 32mhz 68030, 20MB RAM, 160MB HDD. I have absolutely no idea how we kept using that thing for so long. Compared to other Apple systems of the time, it was even a piece of junk when it came out!

Our new system was:
Gateway G6-450
Intel 440BX-based board
Pentium II 450
64MB SDRAM
14.4GB Quantum Fireball HDD
Matsushita DVD-ROM drive
Riva TNT video card (STB Velocity branded, unsure of exact type or specs-- it was upgraded and presumably thrown out before I cared about this stuff. It might have even been a TNT2)
Ensoniq AudioPCI-based integrated audio
US Robotics 56k modem (ISA)
Windows 98 first edition
19" Gateway-branded CRT

It was built to order to last a good while, hence why we spent so much on it. Unfortunately, right after this, Pentium IIIs came out (literally two weeks after the system arrived on our doorstep!), the race to 1 Ghz really ramped up and was met less than a year later, and this thing got left in the dust... quite a victim of bad timing! Regardless, this was our family system until 2003, though it was upgraded along the way, and afterwards I used it as a personal system until mid-2005, and was quite satisfied with it. Following that, it was my younger brother's personal system until late 2007, when it was retired to my workbench. It's unbelievable, but the whole time, it ran the original install of Windows 98 first edition! We just kept patching it up with random fixes as problems came up.

I still keep it running today for Win9x duties (though finally with a fresh install of 98SE), with further upgrades as I get them.