Really? No one? Did I make a classic dos faux pas?

I suppose you could go with just a good 486 and slow it down by lowering the bus speed/multiplier if necessary. Some motherboards have a great turbo button which actually lowers the clock speed, others do something like increase wait states instead, resulting in choppiness instead of a nice, consistent slowdown.

One trick I've used in the past when overclocking or benchmarking is if I want to easily toggle between two bus speeds or multiplier settings (controlled by a single jumper) I just hook the turbo switch connector to said jumper, so I can easily change that particular jumper setting with the push of a button, even on the fly (not really recommended!).

In my experience most games will run on anything. you may have some that do crazy things with pre-vga and they wont work in a fast setup. Also I've noticed that bootable game disks don't like very fast machines. (relatively speaking).

in the end, do you want 2 machines or just one? If you rather focus on the games than hardware, just go dosbox and leave the hardware headaches to the rest of us. If you are willing to put in a LOT of time and money into this, then we can go from there. I just dropped $150 on parts for a 286 this week. 🙁

Ask hardware questions in Marvin. This forum is for DOS games.

Hi GentlemanGene, nice to know there are still gentlemen in the world.

I'd say go with a 486 25 or 33 with a turbo header (most do) and you'll be right for most games of that era. If you come across one that has speed issues, then deal with it then. Getting a 486 up and running is enough effort on it's own, getting the parts for a decent 286 is harder still.

I guess my other words of wisdom are that even games written with a 486 in mind might not work on a given 486. Standards were developing so quickly back in those days that incompatibility was common, and so it's a slippery - one 486 turns into 2, then you need the right sound hardware, then you need...

It depends on what period you want to play games. If you also want to play 486 system games of that area you would be better off with a 486 DX2 66mhz machine.. ( it is the so called `sweet-spot`)
If the period is more the 386 way a slower 486 system would do run fine on those first period 486 games at all 386 games..
If you final want to run much slower games, a can highly recommend to build a slower 286 also.. ( you can play eventually with the system bus speed or disable caches, for me its a no-go. I really dont want to fiddly the whole time on system settings) Thats why i planned about a lot system to be made.