First post, by lowlytech
Growing up always intrigued by the PC, I finally got the bug several years ago to start collecting for a retro pc build. Surprised how difficult it was to find old hardware in my area, most of my stuff came from ebay. Well it kinda turned into accumulating too much stuff over the years and now I find myself really needing to streamline a few of the retro systems down due to lack of physical space. Growing up I played most of my games on 386/486 systems so this era is very dear to my heart, basically late 80's early 90s which I think I have covered pretty well with a 486/33 running dos 6.22 + windows 3.11
For the later games like quake and such I know the 486 won't cut it, so I have a few Pentium/2/3 machines, but what I am wondering is if you can skip over the pentium and P2 era, and straight to a P3 without any ill effects in game compatibility. My current lineup in question is
Whitebox Pentium (Socket 7) 120MHz
Whitebox Pentium (Socket 5)100Mhz
Micron millennia P2 (slot 1) 350Mhz
Whitebox pentium P3 (socket 370) 933Mhz
All systems have at least one ISA slot outfitted with AWE64 and windows 98SE as the OS of choice.. Do you think there is any huge benefit in keeping the p1 and p2 systems? As bad as I want to keep them all for historical value with the different socket/slots types and progression of hardware, I am going to have to consolidate a bit. I can't think of why a P3 can't do everything the other 3 pentium machines can do, but I thought I would ask the experts here before I started thinking about getting rid of some hardware. Thanks for any suggestions or advice you guy have.