I've done a lot of experimenting with industrial Pentium 4 motherboards with ISA slots. In my experience, these can be versatile retro setups especially for a rapidly changing period from the late 80s to late 90s.

Pentium 4 processors have a lot of throttling options, so they're quite versatile for retro gaming. And paired with a motherboard with ISA slots and DMA support, you can have native ISA sound card support under DOS.

I've got one completed system here based on a 3.4GHz Cedar Mill Pentium 4 processor: Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build Log (DOS/3.11/95/NT4/98/2k/Me/XP) This was an experiment to see how many different operating systems I could cram into a single PC. It ended up being one of my favorite builds and I was surprised at just how versatile it is. I've had it throttled down to 286-12MHz level of performance.

I'm also experimenting with a lower-speed (1.6 or 1.8GHz) Pentium 4 socket 478 setup with triple graphic cards (ISA, PCI and AGP). With the right throttling tools, it's possible to throttle lower speed Pentium 4's down to 386 speeds without relying on OCDM or ACPI throttling (since that can cause issues with some games). Paired with a native 1990s ISA graphics card, you effectively get the equivalent of both a native 1990s VGA speed combined with 386 CPU performance.

And then at the high end, you can cover up to 2000/2001 era performance at 1.6 or 1.8GHz with an AGP card.

Just to show what is possible when throttling Pentium 4 processors, these are some performance comparisons for both my Cedar Mill 3.4GHz LGA775 system and a Northwood 1.6GHz socket 478 setup.

For chart reference:

12x to 17x = Cedar Mill processor multiplier settings
CE = full cache enabled
CD = full cache disabled
L1D = level 1 cache disabled
DS = debug store enabled (P4Tool)
DS + BTS = debug store and branch trace store enabled (P4Tool)

I think it's pretty easy to build one basic system to rule all 90's games, extending into the early 2000's a little bit, and including any 80's games that are not speed sensitive.

You just put together a Socket 370 system with a PIII Tualatin, a nice GeForce card for video, and a Sound Blaster 16 for sound.

If you want to include XP era games as well, that gets a little more difficult because XP era hardware breaks full compatibility with the ISA bus for DOS sound, although you could go the Shponglefan route and use P4 hardware that still has full ISA compatibility. But I'm not the biggest fan of the P4 architecture so I won't be the guy to recommend that.

You know, it would be interesting to see how a dual PIII/Xeon system would handle XP era games. Could you achieve high clocked P4 level performance that way? Not sure how many games can take advantage of multiple CPUs.

If you are starting from XT era through to WinXP I dont think you will get that in one machine. At a minimum I would have 4 machines to cover that span:

XT-class Machine for early DOS games
Pentium MMX that can be slowed to 386/486 for other DOS games
Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 with Geforce 4600 or FX5900 or similar for Win98
Core 2 Duo with any decent XP era GPU.

keenmaster486 wrote on Today, 17:34:

I think it's pretty easy to build one basic system to rule all 90's games, extending into the early 2000's a little bit, and including any 80's games that are not speed sensitive.

You just put together a Socket 370 system with a PIII Tualatin, a nice GeForce card for video, and a Sound Blaster 16 for sound.

How well do Pentium III systems throttle for 386, 486 and Pentium era speed sensitive games?

I feel that for 90's gaming you need at least 3 or 4 different levels of reliable performance given how different eras of games were designed at the time.

Should also mention the throttleblaster project as well I guess. That can be used to slow some CPUs down drastically, and in small increments

RetroPCCupboard wrote on Today, 17:50:

If you are starting from XT era through to WinXP I dont think you will get that in one machine. At a minimum I would have 4 mac […]
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If you are starting from XT era through to WinXP I dont think you will get that in one machine. At a minimum I would have 4 machines to cover that span:

XT-class Machine for early DOS games
Pentium MMX that can be slowed to 386/486 for other DOS games
Pentium 4 or Athlon 64 with Geforce 4600 or FX5900 or similar for Win98
Core 2 Duo with any decent XP era GPU.

This could be paired down to only three machines even:

Tandy 1000 SX with 286 accelerator card; an XT, Turbo XT and 286-8 MHz all-in-one
P4 Industrial board with ISA - covers 386 through early XP era
Ivy Bridge system (i7-3770 or equiv.) - covers XP / Vista / Windows 7

This could effectively cover early 80s to early 2010s.

The real answer is to use VMs. But I like the more fun answers everyone else has given.

Honestly I think the future of this question lies in patching every speed sensitive game rather than constantly trying to appease them with such a wide variety of systems.

For a broader approach, have a look here. I think the Hp z400 - z800 can be a very interesting basis

Re: HP Z800 Time machine build

HP Z800 is based on X58, which has the same compatibility as late Core 2 systems (both have ICH family south bridge with Windows 98 drivers) while being noticeably faster.

keenmaster486 wrote on Today, 20:55:

Honestly I think the future of this question lies in patching every speed sensitive game rather than constantly trying to appease them with such a wide variety of systems.

Very possible with AI able to decompile and modify executables. Though Anthropic are starting to block that due to pressure from the likes of Nintendo. I guess they weren't too happy at people porting their games to pc.