So continuing my quest to find ways to justify to myself spending money I'm thinking the following will allow me to cover the majority of games I'd want to play, on real hardware, in as pleasant an experience as possible. Anything falling outside this would be done by emulation, 86box, PCEm, DOSBox, …

so long as it feels right If you're aiming for "feelings", there doesn't seem to be much point in debating whether one component or another is necessarily "better". I think that's a bit too reductive, and presented out of context that phrase leads to the wrong conclusion. Based on what you've said …

Well thank you very much for the replies! I've now decided that Win98SE will be done through emulation in 86box/PCem or through period hardware, or not at all. >If you want to fill your living space with dusty components and spend hour after hour mucking with hardware configurations in desperate …

Feel free to skip ahead to the --- if you don't want to read why I'm asking. I have a room which contains several old computers as well as main main modern PC. I have all of the systems I grew up playing up until I switched to PC for a 386. I wanted to have a DOS machine to cover right through to …