I think it will be a tough one to crack. As Elite is from around 1993 and Rollercoaster Tycoon are from around 2000.
Between these years, the gap in hardware are huge. You might pull this off by building an 4-in-1/time-machine.

To be honest, I don't care about Elite 2 as much. I'm just looking for a compact Windows 98 system using late 90s/early 2000s hardware.

Hmmm.... We are into socket 478/775 stuff then?
There has been a number of treads here, through the last half a year.

Get a Pentium M system (small ITX board) 😀 !

My classic compact recommendations would be:

If you could find one (they are quite rare)
Mitac LP6613

http://www.recycledgoods.com/packard-bell-820 … imedia-820.html

Packard Bell's can be really small and neat 😀

Make shure there are space for a good AGP card, and a nice soundcard.

I had an MSI Mega PC pass through my hands recently. Those are pretty tiny, and if you're not worried about expandability or heating, maybe that will do.

GigaG wrote:

-Roller Coaster Tycoon Loopy Landscapes
-Roller Coaster Tycoon 2
-Frontier: Elite 2

Won't all of those games run perfectly well under Windows 7 or whatever?

^It's more of a retro thing, I guess.

I know the graphics will be terrible, but I've seen Vortex86 embedded PCs/single board computers that might be compatible with Windows 98.

The only thing that worries me is they are not compatible with Pentium Pro/2 and up (i686) instruction sets, while RCT2's system requirements say "Pentium 2 or equivalent." Does this mean RCT2 would fail to run on these? (I'm talking a Vortex86 as in one of the newer ones with an FPU and higher clock rate.)

If you know the GFX will be terrible, then don't go for it.
My advice is to forget about small form factor computers or single board computer, and go for a real computer.

I've got a couple of Compaq D510 and a HP D515 (same PC just pre and post Compaq/HP merger)
You'll need a low profile AGP card but at least it has AGP the power supply is also not standard, everything else is standard though and well built
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIaZuoxSNjw

chinny22 wrote:

I've got a couple of Compaq D510 and a HP D515 (same PC just pre and post Compaq/HP merger)
You'll need a low profile AGP card but at least it has AGP the power supply is also not standard, everything else is standard though and well built
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIaZuoxSNjw

We still have around 40 of D510sff in our network With 2.4ghz Northwoods, 2GB ram and 80GB IDE drives loaded with Win7 x86 Enterprise. It has an Integrated Intel Graphics, but many of ours has a Geforce 6200. We are now deploying Win10 so theese will be retired now, but i hopefully can try saving some 😊
Its a very reliable and good looking workhorse that HP still has Win98 drivers for. The EVO D500sff are almost similar but use SD-ram and came mostly with a Nvidia Vanta low profile AGP card and had no Integrated graphics.
The D500sff support 3GB ram, but its successor D510 only 2GB DDR ram.

I would also look out for some of HP/Compaqs business laptops that often had ATI Graphics like EVO N400C,N410C and N600C. Get an Armadastation II for them and you get PCI expansion.
Later came EVO610C (P4 m) and nc4000, nc4010, nc6000 with Pentium M. nc6000 dont have any official 98 drivers, but i think its possible to use them from other models.

What about a VIA Epia Mini ITX mainboard? It uses a late-C3 processor (Pentium III compatible, fairly acceptable performance for DOS/Win9x ~Celeron Mendocino), and are dirt-cheap. Also, you can adjust CPU multipliers on air in both Windows & DOS for speed sensitive games.

However, it lacks AGP (but has a PCI slot). There are models using SDRAM or DDR. I worked with one of this in the past, but there are newer models that might be more powerful. One of the advantages is that you'll only need a mini-itx case and a HDD:

http://www.mini-itx.com/reviews/nehemiah/

NEC made many P3/P4 all-in-one machines like this Powermate 2000:

and Z1:

just get a socket 462 motherboard with 1x AGP and 3x PCI those are cheap and powerful enough for windows 98 and grab a micro ATX case.

This is cheap depending on your location http://www.ebay.com/itm/Asrock-K7S41GX-Socket … LAAAMXQuTNTKz4P

Let me add a bit of a plot twist.

I have a Windows 98 PC. (I just have the urge to build something, haha, and I also want something more compact.)

This PC uses an AMD Slot A Athlon 750MHz, an OEM processor from Gateway (it's a Gateway "minitower", but I don't feel like it deserves the label "mini".) If I found a Slot A MicroATX motherboard, would that CPU be decent? I've heard that the Athlons of that era outperformed Pentiums of the same clock rate.

(The GPU is an nVidia Vanta, which I guess could also be reused, but AFAIK that's a low end card.)

GigaG wrote:

If I found a Slot A MicroATX motherboard, would that CPU be decent? I've heard that the Athlons of that era outperformed Pentiums of the same clock rate.

If the object is to run Roller Coaster Tycoon, then consider the game's system requirements. If you want something with "more performance", then you'll just have to decide what is "retro" enough for you.

GigaG wrote:

I know the graphics will be terrible

The game isn't 3D-rendered, right? Accordingly the GPU won't make much of a difference, if I'm not mistaken.