Honestly thats overkill.

If you want my reasonable opinion. Alomst none of the games you listed are 3dfx games, so I don't see why you need a 3dfx card. But if you must a voodoo 3 is a very good card that will give you great compatibility.

Voodoo 3 or Go for like a TNt2
440BX
CPU you don't need 1ghz you can get away with much less like 600-800 MHZ
512 Ram you probably only need 256 MB
Sound
Aureal A3D, Yamaha XG or an ISA card like a AWE64
If you can find a motherboard with SBLINK than a Yamaha XG with a SBLINK or a AWE PCI with SB link is a good pick. Just know that PCI cards in general are not very good for DOS exceft for a couple cards like the ones i listed.

Yeah, dudes. I wanna build a Windows 98 gaming computer to play old DOS games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. help me pick my parts. I was thinking of getting a 4.2GHz 12-core Ryzen 9 processor, 64GB of RAM and a GTX 2080ti. Would that be enough to play this game?

I'm just kidding! 🤣 Seriously, though, 1GHz is way overkill for all that, as well as 512MB. 64MB is more than enough to run ALL of those games perfectly fine. A Voodoo3 is a GREAT suggestion for that time period. GLIDE compatibility for later as well as decent 16-bit color graphics. Look around for cheap used processors. if you get a SLOT-1 MB with a 440 chip, then Pentium II and Pentium III are both available. Look around for 400 MHz P2 or something.

It's hard to recommend parts, because those particular games will run on almost anything. A socket 370 board with at least one ISA slot would be a good idea. A 1ghz pIII is way overkill, but it is actually cheaper these days than a socket 7 build.

Voodoo 3 cards are pretty expensive. They are great cards for 98 and DOS, but you do have other options. A geforce 440mx or 460mx is also a good choice. You can also try an FX 5500 or similar PCI card and use Nglide.

Maybe 1GHz is overkill, but I see no problem, especially if it's easier / cheaper to obtain. I think all these games will run well inside Windows (even the DOS games), so may even get by without a proper ISA sound card.

1ghz maybe cheap enough to obtian. The issue is finding a board that will run it properly. If you get a 100MHZ FSB model more motherboards can run it. But still early BX boards wont work. There is always VIA boards but I do not recommend them even if they are fine. If you want the 133 MHZ FSB 1ghz on a BX board that might take awhile for you to find a good board otherwise you will have to go with VIA>

However if you lowered you expectations a lot and said 600-800 MHZ with 100 MHZ FSB there are a lot of boards that will run this properly and you have a good chance of finding a pretty decent board.

Once you get into the idea that you want to have proper agp dividers and IDE that is UDMA 100mbits or higher your board choices get low and boards get expensive becasue you are nearing the end of that platform. Which is probably really unnecessary. Then your next step is 810 chipset which lacks ISA.

ANd if you spend a ton of money trying to get the best hardware becasue it really will get very expenive understand that you still hit a brick wall, as far as how fast it will be and what you can actually play on it if you want to do newer games.

The most CPU demanding game on your list is Red Alert 2 since it uses software rendering and support high resolution. A 500Mhz Pentium 3/Athlon should be fine for 1024x768 which is a good way to experience the game IMO. You can off course go much faster if you want, it depends on your interest and the price you are willing to pay.

A Geforce 2 MX would be a cheap option to play those games. Voodoo 3 is more period correct but much more expensive. This is if you want to use Glide for nostalgia. All those games works great with a Geforce though. The first Tomb Raider will be software rendering only but will run fast with the CPU you are aiming for.

Given that almost none of those games do GLide, I'd say go for a good D3D card - and if you want GLide, add a V2 (or two). I've come to the same conclusion, with my P3-1400S completely bottlenecking on my V3-3000AGP, and Win9x not letting me run V3-3000 PCI next to whatever D3D card I want (probably G400Max or GeForce3Ti200).

dionb wrote:

Win9x not letting me run V3-3000 PCI next to whatever D3D card I want (probably G400Max or GeForce3Ti200).

I have had success installing voodoo drivers first and then nvidia drivers. I then switch between PCI and AGP in the bios. Works fine with my FX Quadro and Voodoo 3 2000 PCI.

So how would a Intel SE440BX-2/550 MHz PIII/256 MB RAM work? All together for $70.00.

Or

Abit BE6-II/800 MHz PIII/640 MB RAM. All for $110.00.

A 550mhz PIII would be fine for any games released before 2000.

There are better deals on ebay for socket 370 and slot 1, including buying each piece separately.

ssnyderu2 wrote:

So how would a Intel SE440BX-2/550 MHz PIII/256 MB RAM work? All together for $70.00.

Or

Abit BE6-II/800 MHz PIII/640 MB RAM. All for $110.00.

Intel board is a perfect config (I don’t recommend Abit because it uses 440BX at 133 MHz, but that’s just my experience). Throw in a Glide card and something like AWE32/64 with RAM expansion and you got yourself a great machine for the games you’ve listed.

Got the seller of the Intel SE440BX-2/550 MHz PIII/256 MB RAM down to $55.00, so went ahead and got that. Now to sort the rest out. Any thoughts on using those SD or Flash to IDE adapters in place of an old IDE hard drive?

I would recommend an SSD drive. Either with a promise SATA controller or with a IDE to SATA adapter.

Also recommend the Sata adapter option, less messing around. You could also use a standard HDD if you have one lying around spare.
Keep in mind the motherboard cant support drives larger then 160GB

Cant recommend a voodoo, too expensive and not used enough in your game list.
Better off with a GeForce 4 MX or GeForce FX
Sound I would stick with an ISA card and mayby even a Midi daughter board as the majority are dos games and none of the Win9x exclusives really support things like EAX
Sound Blaster 16 (just check which version if you are going with external midi) or Yamaha YMF are popular/common options

That maximum size for a single partition in windows 98 is 128gb anyway. I have had two slot 1 boards - one took the IDE to SATA adapter with a 120gb SSD drive no problem, the one I have now doesn't like it so I use a promise card. I think my current board just needs a bios update though, because pretty much all slot 1 boards should support larger drives.