IMHO, there is no single DOS rig to do it all. It depends on what era of gaming you're interested in.

If you're interested in early to mid 90's then a Pentium rig would do the trick, especially if you're planning on 3D games.

The quintessential DOS gaming rig is IMHO the 486 DX2/66. That would get you up the early 90's (i.e. original Doom). But would not have enough power if you're looking for more of the Duke 3D / Quake era of games.

Shponglefan wrote on 2022-08-30, 22:23:

IMHO, there is no single DOS rig to do it all. It depends on what era of gaming you're interested in.

If you're interested in early to mid 90's then a Pentium rig would do the trick, especially if you're planning on 3D games.

The quintessential DOS gaming rig is IMHO the 486 DX2/66. That would get you up the early 90's (i.e. original Doom). But would not have enough power if you're looking for more of the Duke 3D / Quake era of games.

I've got some spare single core Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs hanging around.

Would that be too much horsepower for late 90s 3d games?

While I primarily play DOS games on my Retro Rig, it's capable of running Windows 98 too.

There are programs that will slow down the CPU speed for older games, and I use a IDE-to SD card adapter with an extension ribbon to easily swap between operating systems.

tomcattech wrote on 2022-08-30, 22:43:

I've got some spare single core Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs hanging around.

Would that be too much horsepower for late 90s 3d games?

P4 and Athlon XPs are really more suited to Windows 98 / XP era gaming. If you're after late 90s 3D gaming, that would be the Windows 9x era, not DOS.

DOS era gaming basically runs from early 80s to mid 90s. After that, Windows took over.

tomcattech wrote on 2022-08-30, 22:43:

I've got some spare single core Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs hanging around.

Would that be too much horsepower for late 90s 3d games?

No, but you won't be able to build a DOS rig with those CPUs.

kolderman wrote on 2022-08-31, 00:25:

tomcattech wrote on 2022-08-30, 22:43:

I've got some spare single core Pentium 4s and Athlon XPs hanging around.

Would that be too much horsepower for late 90s 3d games?

No, but you won't be able to build a DOS rig with those CPUs.

...you can indeed build a DOS rig with them, there are ISA boards for both Single core P4s and Athlon XPs, ISA aside since you dont need ISA to get DOS compatible sound, just a nice ESS Solo-1 or SBLive with DOS drivers. As for Video well the boards do have PCI so any nice Cirrus Logic PCI card would work along with any of the thousand S3 Virge based cards or perhaps the super compatible Trio 64+.

Getting a pure DOS machine would be as simple as using one of the DOS 7.1 install compilations out there, even 6.22 should work fine with correctly picked HDDs and 2gb partitions.

The only issue here is that the rig would be too fast for any early DOS games but later DOS games would run just fine, depending on what Athlon XP it is it may be able to be downclocked with BIOS tweaks and 3rd party programs to make it even more suitable.

If OP has a early 423 P4 like a early 1.3/1.4 Willamette then even better as they were slow as shit to begin with and nerfing them even further only makes them better as a DOS slave.