For an ABSOLUTE beginner in retro computing, I would recommend a Slot 1 based machine, as they are cheap, readily available, and hard to screw up.

For someone who loves retro computing, there is almost no better machine than a 486. It almost perfectly combines really classic machines like the AT and 386 machines, with a hint of the future, with high end models being able to compete with the first Pentiums.

These are my builds for both.

P3:
Intel SE-440BX2
P3-450
GeForce 2MX
Sound Blaster Live! Value
384MB SDRAM
40 GB Segate Barracuda

486 (My most favorite system)
DataExpert ExpertBoard EXP-4045 Socket 3 Motherboard
Am486-DX4-100 clocked @ 120Mhz
32MB FPM DRAM in one SIMM
2GB WD Caviar EIDE
DTC dual channel EIDE M/I/O card
Sound Blaster AWE32 CT3670 me thinks 2MB
Diamond Stealth SE VLB (S3 Trio32) 2MB

The first one was cheaper, but I had the sound card and graphics card on hand already, but you have the sound card.

The second one was I think around 160-170 USD from Ebay after a lot of scouting and searching, as well as weeks of waiting for the Russian Post.

as mentioned above a slot 1 computer is a very good start, acces to parts is cheap and easy to come by, although a Athlon XP or PIII is a option aswell.
A slot 1 or ofcourse slot A is a good way to start out for retro imo.
when choosing Slot 1 I recommend a mobo with the 440BX chipset, if you want to get the best boards (ofcourse opinions may differ on the subject) get a Asus P2B-F or P3B-F board which is very easy to play around and still has alot of OC options.
CPU can be either PII or PIII since both use slot 1.
a Geforce 2 is the easiest choice combined with a Voodoo II for glide, although a Banshee or Voodoo 3 2000 or 3000 is a option aswell (this all depends on your AGP port).
512 Mb memory is what you need max, if you want to use windows 98 (this is more then enough anyway for any game of that era)
Sound Blaster Live! is a good option especially if you have one lying around already.
this can be had under €100,- depending on how retro and time period correct you wish to be. I suggest taking a looking at Phillscomputerlab website for additional tips and tricks 😀

The PII I currently use is able to play about any game dating back from 1990's till early 2000's running windows ME (yes ME, 98 is better though 😲 )(Believe 2002 is about the max, after that my Athlon XP jumps in and takes over)

For a sound card on Slot 1 system, the yamaha DS-XG is also a very decent board. It will let you play MS-DOS games with a real opl3 and great sbpro compatibility while from what I've heared, the sb live has all sorts of flaws with PCI and also with DOS compatibility while this one doesn't. All you need for the greatest compatibility is a board with the SB_link connector (most Slot 1 with intel chipset has it) and a SB_link cable (can be easily made out of a floppy or IDE cable I guess. Make sure that your DS-XG card has it too (for some reasons some of them don't) and once it's connected you'll have a great compatibility under MS-DOS. And it's not a bad windows sound card either !

What's the motherboard for your Athlon64?

Keep them but to be honest they are not suitable for DOS era gaming, the AMD system is good for fast 98 gaming but for some early games it might be too fast and it does not have DOS compatible audio. The Core 2 system is good for patched versions of 98 games from GOG and XP/Win7 era games. For DOS I strongly recommend that you get or build a more period correct system like a pentium 1 system as you can tweak for slower speeds without needing to spend a heap on a proper 386 or 486 system.

General rule if it doesn't have ISA slots or SB Link for select pci sound cards your DOS audio compatibility is going to be limited to just a few cards unless you luck on a board that compatible audio onboard like a yamaha or ess ect.

Go ahead with working with the AMD system first as it will be good practice for building a Win 9x system and you should enjoy it. Do not dump either system as that will be a mistake in the long run.

The Athlon64 is downward multiplier unlocked, so overcoming speed issues on Win98 gaming shouldn't be a problem.

kode54 wrote:

I kind of want one of those DreamBlaster X2 things too, but know I'll probably just end up running it off USB and line input. I kind of also want to pester their designers to see if they have a software simulator, or if they have plans to make the USB interface capable of digitally recording the output of the Dream synthesizer, for live capture in the host machine.

Hey,
I am 'their designers' 😉.
- there is no software simulator for X2, this is a multicore hardware DSP synth.
- X2 will not have digital USB recording, it is not possible hardware wise on this board (due to the crystal frequency needed for USB, this is a single crystal board).
- but X3M has digital USB recording possibility !!
The X3M board has the necessary two crystals on board, to do streaming 48Khz audio over USB, in both directions 😀. WIthout special drivers, it uses 'USB AUDIO Class'.
It can do MIDI synthesis, stereo PCM playback, AND digital PCM recording of this MIDI synthesis + AUDIO.
This means it can digitally record the game music and sound effects.
I have this feature basically working already but still needs some work to get the volume right.

For dos games, nothing better than 430TX board and Pentium (mmx), the best frequency is around 75~133mhz(depending on the era of games u wish to play most)

if u wish to play win9x game with a kind of best-all-around PC, use ur Athlon64 and save the money for some other valuable things. U will need a nforce 3 Ultra motherboard, a Geforce FX 5X00(5700~5950 is recommand) card for D3D 6.0~8.1 & opengl games, a voodoo3 PCI or a voodoo4 (luckily if u can get one, both AGP and PCI are ok because voodoo4 agp is the only voodoo card with AGP 4x support which means it can be used on your nforce 3's AGP 4x/8x slot) for D3D 5.0~6.0 & glide games and a ATI Card (Radeon 8500~9800) for DX 9.0b games and some special games such as Metal Gear Solid 2. Since Athlon64 is downward multiplier unlocked, this PC could cover 90%+ of games for win9x without any problem on its performance, and even perfect some early games for WinXP.

But sound card is quite complicated. For win9x gaming pc, Diamond MX300 and Audigy 2 are considered as the best gaming sound cards, and Sound Blaster 16pro, awe32 and Yamaha are the most considerable choices for DOS and midi games

Oops, I forgot to list the boards.

The modern thing is an MSI Z77A-GD65. The Gen-1 (Core 2) is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3R. The Gen-2 (Athlon64) is an Asus K8V Deluxe.

And sitting somewhere in my garage is another machine I forgot to mention. It's a Coppermine Celeron 1.333GHz in a Slot 1 adapter, in an Abit BE6 (440BX) motherboard, with maybe 1GB of RAM, I'm not sure. I do know this Slot 1 adapter was a royal pain, since it didn't include the cartridge, so it didn't lock into the slot, and frequently jarred loose at the least provocation and caused hard locks. This machine also peaked at having a GeForce 2 GT or similar video card.

I should mention that in all my years of PC ownership, I've never had the fortune of owning either a Voodoo based GPU, or a Gravis Ultrasound. The Voodoo would have been perfect with my first, Packard Bell, PC, *except* for the fact that I would have needed a separate video card as well, since the stupid BIOS disabled the onboard Cirrus Logic graphics if it caught so much as a whiff of a video card, even accessory video cards that didn't even have a mappable BIOS or framebuffer, so plugging one of those in pre-POST would have resulted in a non-POSTing system.

I even had the opportunity to buy a Gravis Ultrasound at one point, OEM packaging, from a PC Club shop locally, except I didn't have the money at the time. It would have been something like $60 plus tax, new in box.

PCI-E slot should be avoid if u wish to rebuild ur win9x gaming PC, it is quite troublesome due to lack of win9x drivers support and so many hardware compatibility problems.

So the best performance u can get from is the intel 865/875 or Nforce 3 ultra chipset based board with AGP 4x/8x slot. 440BX is also a nice choice, especially if u got some ISA cards to go with, BUT, most of those boards are equipped with only slot 1, AGP 1X/2X, ATA-33 (33MB/s max) ide controller and 100mhz max FSB, so the performance may not get u satisfied unless u got a really nice board with socket370, ATA-100 IDE controller and 133mhz FSB supported, such as ASUS CUBX-E. These motherboard are quite rare but worthy enough to get.

Tualatin-core-ready intel 815ep chipset is an ideal platform too. A higher frequency Tualatin cored Pentium 3 combined with a nice GPU could cover most of games from D3D 6.0~8.1 pretty well in relatively low CPU temperature and less power consumption, although no ISA slot available. VIA and SIS's chipsets should be avoid either with the same reason: troublesome hardware compatibilities and poor performance. But for Athlon and Athlon XP platforms, VIA is considerable choice

Voodoo based 3D accelerator is something necessary if u do hope to get ur memory back on those 95~2000s retro games. Glide was the most popular API at that time. Glide could be emulated for sure but it could be done on ur modern machines too, and u may face big troubles for some glide-only games such as Populous III due to their poor modern hardware compatibilities. D3D 5.0~6.0 APIs were disasters for its poor performance, image qualities and compatibilities.

Actually, not all voodoo cards need two slots. Voodoo3/4 are the best choices IMO, especially the PCI version, and the image qualities on voodoo1/2 is quite low with a very narrow range of resolution supports.

Saotome Ranma wrote:

So the best performance u can get from is the intel 865/875 or Nforce 3 ultra chipset based board with AGP 4x/8x slot. 440BX is also a nice choice, especially if u got some ISA cards to go with, BUT, most of those boards are equipped with only slot 1, AGP 1X/2X, ATA-33 (33MB/s max) ide controller and 100mhz max FSB, so the performance may not get u satisfied unless u got a really nice board with socket370, ATA-100 IDE controller and 133mhz FSB supported, such as ASUS CUBX-E. These motherboard are quite rare but worthy enough to get.

If he want a higher performing Windows 9x/DOS rig he should stay away from nForce3 and rather stick to his VIA based Asus K8V Deluxe. It's actual possible to find PCI sound cards that works in DOS with VIA chipsets (even without a TSR).

If he want a higher performing Windows 9x/DOS rig he should stay away from nForce3 and rather stick to his VIA based Asus K8V Deluxe. It's actual possible to find PCI sound cards that works in DOS with VIA chipsets (even without a TSR).

Yea, it is true. But Pentium 4 and Athlon64 platforms are overpowered quite much for dos games, and these platforms are initially designed for Windows OS, playing dos games on those overpowered platforms is a kind of challenges, even the Tualatin cored P3 platform. Those platforms should focus on win9x only.

For win9x/DOS players, 430TX with Pentium MMX, Super Socket 7 chipset with AMD k6 series, and even 440BX with a Coppermine Pentium 3 are much proper combinations. 😀 😀

Saotome Ranma wrote:

if u wish to play win9x game with a kind of best-all-around PC, use ur Athlon64 and save the money for some other valuable things. U will need a nforce 3 Ultra motherboard, a Geforce FX 5X00(5700~5950 is recommand) card for D3D 6.0~8.1 & opengl games

Is there any reason you recommend the FX 5X00 over say, the 6600 GT? The 6600 GT blows the FX5X00 out of the water, outperforming even the FX 5950. It was also released as AGP 8X and has official driver support from nVidia for Windows 98 (the last card to do so). Are there any downsides to it for Win 9X gaming? It's pretty affordable on eBay too - just snagged a new open box one for $15 shipped. My plan is to do an Athlon 64 build as well so want to double check I'm not making a mistake getting this card.

darkNiGHTS wrote:

Is there any reason you recommend the FX 5X00 over say, the 6600 GT?

GF 6X00 Series is also a nice choice, but it depends on the APIs of games u wish to play most. GF 6X00 is very effective for DX 7.0~9.0c games, but it dropped an important feature in DX 5.0~6.0, the 8-bit paletted texture support(GF 7X00 series drops more), so u may suffer some display problems on some old games in use of D3D 5.0~6.0 such as Final Fantasy VII & VIII. Meanwhile, GF FX 5X00 series covers all the features from D3D 5.0~9.0a, especially it is a beast for DX 8.1 games, even more powerful than GF 6X00 series. Besides, nearly every DX 9.0 games could be played more efficiently on win 2K/xp, those 32bit OS with native multiple CPU support, up to 4GB memory support, and much better system resource management are the best for DX 9.0+ games.

So, windows 9x machines should focus on those games using APIs of Glides, DX 5.0~8.1, early openGL, and some special APIs such as S3TC etc, DX 9.0 games are out of their ranges IMO. 😀 😀 Of course u can set up ur win9x & XP dual boot system urself.