I posted about a similar idea only with a P4, so line-by line;

Core 2 will work, would likely be overkilkl for 99.9% of anything considered "retro", though so would the P4.
4GB of ram: You could get 16 on most boards and not even break $30... course anything 32-bit will only see 4 of em minus your video RAM size.
Storage: If you have a spare PCI-E x4 or even x1 slot, why not try an M.2 to PCI-E adapter? Potentially 10 times faster than a SATA SSD.
Modern Linux: Yes, with caveats. Core 2 days were VERY spotty given how new a lot of the hardware was and how much of it got superseded before long. Hardware compatibility might be a snag.
Win7: In its sleep.
Old OS:
DOS: Iffy. Would boot, and if you can get the right drivers you might get sound. Make sure whatever video card you get has good compatibility as a lot of PCI-E offerings dropped compatibility in this generation. Hardware choice would be key.
Win 3.1: Probably worse than DOS. Pretty much guaranteed you're not going to find any kind of video driver, and might even have trouble with sound.
Win9x: Should work well. For Win3.1 and DOS compatibility this is where you should actually live as it passes along a fair bit of hardware compatibility in terms of storage media and, if you can't get your PCI sound card to work you can try VDMSound. (If nothing else, USB support means transferring games from your normal rig will be way easier and that's native in 98.)

To my knowledge there's no PCI to ISA bridge out there unless it's purpose built for a specific board and architecture, IE as a backplane. There's no general solution to that problem, though there are PnP PCI sound cards that are pretty good with DOS.

Motherboard: In my hypothetical build I went with an ASUS gaming board, just make sure whatever you get ticks the right boxes and doesn't have a forest of bad caps, that was the capocalypse era.
CPU: There were quad core Core processors, can't remember the designation offhand but that's what Google's for.
Graphics: PCI-E, don't exceed 256MB as Win9x has some issues. Avoid ATI due to compatibility problems in DOS.
Sound Card: Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 works well in 9x, and there are DOS drivers. Really that'd hinge on the existence of DOS drivers for your PCI sound card as there aren't many Core 2 boards with ISA slots.
Network: Any common Intel chip will work out of the box with Win9x and Linux. No worries or issues there.
Keyboard/Mouse: Pretty trivial to find PS/2 devices but yeah, USB will work just fine provided you enable legacy support in BIOS.

Even with memory patches, windows 98 won't boot with more than 2gb of memory (or at least I have never gotten it to boot).

You can run vanilla DOS however. I have even gotten it to boot off of USB before.

A PCI Voodoo 3 IMO goes a long way for DOS and windows 98. I have had success with Voodoo 3 2000 on ebay as of late for not outlandish prices.

For core2duo, I have heard that some very rare chipsets have ISA slots, but I have never seen one. The most flexible is the ASrock Dual-VSTA and similar VIA chipsets with AGP and PCIE. When I experimented with a core2duo in windows 98 though, I had a somewhat jittery and buggy experience. You might do better... personally I think pentium 4 is ideal for that OS.

For PCI cound cards for DOS, you can do sound blaster emulation on Audigy and Sound Blaster Live cards, or you can use the Yamaha YM74X PCI cards with real OPL3. Compatability in both cases is rather limited. The most compatiable PCI cound card is the ESS SOLO-1 with excellent soundblaster emulation. Another alternative is to use the opl3lpt parallel port sound devices. Compatibility is pretty decent with the TSR and game patches, but you won't get a wave table header or general midi.

You can find industrial pentium 4 boards with ISA slots. They are rare, but not unicorn rare. The behavior of the ISA slots when it comes to DMA, I have read, can sometimes be screwy though.

Anyway you slice it, you are going to have to make compromises. A lot of compromises probably. Personally I think the asrock 4coredual-vsta board with a couple of PCI sound cards and video cards gets the closest. You can run up to three video cards if you use the AGP, PCIE, and a PCI card (Switchable in the bios) with three PCI slots left over for sound cards. DOS and windows 98 compatibility will be just ok, but it will run anything on XP and you can run windows 7 on it if you want to (although probably with only 2GB of RAM if you also want to triple boot windows 98).

mothergoose729 wrote:

For PCI cound cards for DOS, you can do sound blaster emulation on Audigy and Sound Blaster Live cards, or you can use the Yamaha YM74X PCI cards with real OPL3. Compatability in both cases is rather limited. The most compatiable PCI cound card is the ESS SOLO-1 with excellent soundblaster emulation. Another alternative is to use the opl3lpt parallel port sound devices. Compatibility is pretty decent with the TSR and game patches, but you won't get a wave table header or general midi.

There are game port to wavetable header adapters provided said game port features MPU-401. Would give you a lot of flexibility combined with a Dreamblaster. Said option would be pretty expensive though. Wavetable headers are lacking in most PCI sound cards.

If you want to hit all the main points of any DOS sound card you're looking for real, possibly discrete OPL3. (Yamaha chips, essentially.) This will give you the best version of the familiar game soundtracks a-la AdLib or Sound Blaster's FM synth. After that you want a game port with MPU-401 compatibility, which allows you to connect to an external MIDI device (like the Roland devices). Finally, you want a wavetable header to connect to the WaveBlaster or DreamBlaster add-on boards. Full coverage from the authentic chiptunes to sampled wavetable MIDI.

Theres no such thing as one rig to rule them all. Because of the compromises you have to make for retro compatibility will restrain the hardware for newer games and vice versa compromises you have to make to run new games will cause incompatibilities for older games.

But anyways my thoughts are the strongest graphics card you can use is FX series agp or pci-e express cards that have a bridge chip that use a FX series GPU such as FX PCX cards. problem with newer cards like 6 series is they lax compatibility with things like fog tables. Sound card you want to use a PCI card that can do decent dos compatibility like A3D MX300 or Yamaha XG. You can consider Audigy 2zs if you want newer games, with some backwards compatibility. If you use a nvidia card you can use like Nglide for 3dfx compatibility in windows, if your CPU is fast enough you can run dos box. I am building a such system like this around a 915 chipset.

Again it wont be a PC to rule them all but I should cover a large swath from late 90s to mid 2000s.

mothergoose729 wrote:

Even with memory patches, windows 98 won't boot with more than 2gb of memory (or at least I have never gotten it to boot.

Don't know how legit it is, but this guy claims to sell a patch that allows Win98 to use 4gb http://rloew.x10host.com/

Tbh I'd ditch the 'can run modern Linux/Windows acceptably' requirement. The demands a modern browser places on your system are so massive you really can't get that to work satisfactorily within the possibilities of hardware that will run retro stuff. Even 4GB of RAM isn't enough to run Chromium or Firefox in a way that is enjoyable, and 2GB is the max for DOS even booting...

I'd draw the line between Win9x and XP, with a Win9x and below system having 512MB RAM, and the >XP system having >4GB (even if XP32 can only use <4GB of it).

You can put DOS on anything. I booted to DOS by mistake once on my haswell system with 16gb of RAM. I was transferring files onto a CF card with a USB adapter and I rebooted the machine. It booted to USB by default and suddenly I was in DOS. Same OS as my XT machine 🤣

Should I build a "one rig to rule them all"?

No.

ruthan is already doing that. Ask him how he likes it.

From my experience, do not bother.

You might get Windows 98 or other older OS'es to run on specific motherboards with a Core 2, but you'll get so many strange errors that you will never figure out of, and most of them boils down to the hardware setup. You can techincally do it, but it's not useable in practice. If you limit yourself to for instance late 90s to end of Windows XP you should be able to do that in one machine.

It's a fool's errand, don't try it.

dr_st wrote:

Should I build a "one rig to rule them all"?

No.
ruthan is already doing that. Ask him how he likes it.

There are multiple people who did that here 😈 And yeah, I can confirm, it's pain... And I would also say it's really unnecessary...

There is no such thing like universal race car and there is no such thing as universal retro PC. If you want such thing then your best bet is DOSBox or (even better) - PC-em on a modern PC.

just think you need 2-3 computers.
1. daily driver
2. something to cover dx3-8 games windows games that old.
3. some kinda 486 66 or some kind of socket 7.

/thread.

TLDR the #2 computer is the most important to be a one kind of rig just know that it hs its limitations. 😘

ISA friendly solutions.

1. ATX/AT Socket 7 system with Pentium MMX/AMD K6-III CPU
Difficulty to acquire: Easy to Medium

2. ATX Slot 1/Socket 370 system with VIA C3/Pentium 3 swappable combo OR multiplier unlocked Pentium II
Difficulty to acquire: Easy

3. KT133 motherboard with multiplier unlocked AMD Athlon XP
Difficulty to acquire: Easy to Medium

3. Industrial Intel 845P or 865G/PE motherboard with Socket 478
Difficulty to acquire: Hard

4. Industrial Intel 865G/PE motherboard with LGA775 socket (optionally Core 2 support)
Difficulty to acquire: Very Hard

Non-ISA friendly solutions.

1. Asrock Dual VSTA/4Core VSTA system (AGP+PCI-E combo, Core 2 support, Win9x drivers)
Difficulty to acquire: Medium to Hard

2. Asrock 865G/PE system with LGA775 and Core 2 support
Difficulty to acquire: Medium

3. Intel D850MV system with SB-Link support (may require additional soldering)
Difficulty to acquire: Medium

4. Intel 975X based system (last ICH7 motherboard series with true IDE, FDD and unofficial Win9x drivers)
Difficulty to acquire: Easy

*I've intentionally skipped popular mentions like regular 865PE/875P, VIA KT333, Athlon 64, etc, because they don't bring anything interesting to the table. Anything below Pentum MMX should not be even considered.
**Difficulty is based on typical availability and/or price.

pci cards that offer sb compatibility in windows 98 will play most games that require it. some pci cards will work in pure dos with some games. isa cards are needed for everything that don't follow under those conditions. some of those games or id say alot of them have some kinda other hardware issues with graphics cards or are speed sensitive and running some fast cpu even if you have a isa card you will run into all kinds of other problems.. so once again its a waste of time.

sirnephilim wrote:

4GB of ram: You could get 16 on most boards and not even break $30... course anything 32-bit will only see 4 of em minus your video RAM size.

I don't think this is true because I installed gtx 780ti with 3Gb of video ram to my old core2duo system and winxp 32bit and if that would be true it could only see 1Gb of ram because of 3Gb of video ram but the window sees bit less than 4Gb of ram like with all the other 32bit winxp systems I have tested.

In 32-bit OS: physical 4 Gb RAM - reserved address space for all devices (including CPU cores) = available RAM.

The Serpent Rider wrote:

In 32-bit OS: physical 4 Gb RAM - reserved address space for all devices (including CPU cores) = available RAM.

PAE and address remapping can allow a 32bit OS to utilize the full 4GB of RAM and even more (if you have it available, and the HW memory controller supports it). It is just that Microsoft locked the physical address space to 4GB in all 32-bit client OS SKUs since XP SP2. And server SKUs only come in 64-bit flavors since Win7/2008 R2.

Most "universal" retro PC systems can't support more than 4 gigabytes anyway, so it does not matter.