I would go with Tomb Raider II. To me that was the best Tomb Raider until we get to the remakes and modern iterations. Stay away from Angel of Darkness, that game really sucks the life out of the series. Almost anything else is probably fine though depending on what you have on hand. With the exception of Angel of Darkness, the game that pretty much killed the Tomb Raider series, I don't remember any of the graphics engines being that different from one another.

Angel of Darkness was the best one and that is the one I recommend 😀

I bought a bundle of Tomb Raider games from eBay a few months ago, then tried to play TR2 and got frustrated with the controls. It seemed impossible to play, but I guess it takes practice.

You have to think of the movement in tomb raider as block based. while you can move within the block all of the jumps and actions you need to take are measured by complete blocks. For what a block is just look at any block you push or pull. Pushing forward will cause you to jump from one end of the block to another. Sam with pushing back. When you try to time actions such as running and jumping start the action at the beginning of that block then you will jump right at the end of that block.

As I said above I really didnt like Ange of Darkness, primarily for the reason that even after hours of gameplay there has yet to be a tomb or any raiding in it. They tried to make a more mature and beliavable story and left all the exotics locales out, instead you explore an apartment building, an empty warehouse, city streets and a few short sewers, you get what I'm saying. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion of course but I think if Angel of Darkness is your first Tomb Raider game you will most likely quit playing and not get what the deal is and why people like the games.

make sure you finish all the tutorials (training grounds)
or even start from understanding controls of Prince Of Persia 1 and 2 (2D versions) (though no tutorials for those)

Actually you could also start with Anniversary as that one has modern controlls.
Take TR 2 Remake, Legend and Underworld next.
I don't recommend TR 2013 and Rise of TR cause of long and boring survival elements (you can just start them as the beginnings are nice)
As for 1-6 it is best to play them in that order cause of increasing controls complication with each game. (though you will already know all lara's abilities from modern games)

Actually all the control difficulty in early Tomb Raider and Prince Of Persia games is that they have realistic jumping from run-up. So you need to decide you make a jump two footsteps before the edge, as if you decide to do it at the edge of the cliff like in other games, you won't be magically pushed up.

I'll probably start with either TR3 or The Last Revelation....I've no luck using older games 95-97 on my W98 systems.

Thanks for the tips on the controls, sounds like it's a bit different than Quake.

I think you can play all games with Peixoto's patches on your modern PC

Peixoto's patches for a few old games