If it is mini itx then it will likely only have 1 PCI slot. You’ll generally want at least two in order to have decent sound and audio working as the onboard ones may be too modern.

Yeah, even back in the day, Sound Blaster reigned supreme when it came to NOT locking up your system. I think what surprised me was the fact Win98 would even go on a board made after 2004.

The biggest issue which was already mentioned is the single PCI slot. Even if the board has drivers 3D performance is generally not great. So you are stuck with getting a PCI video card and then sticking with the onboard audio.

If you already have the hardware, give it a spin. Worse case it's too new for Win98. If that's the case, I don't believe it's worth messing with XP. The Atom was underpowered in its time, and it could do some very light gaming. But for XP there are many much better options.

Win98 can run pretty stable, especially if you aren't using it as a daily driver with all types of weird software loaded to navigate the early days of the Internet.

Intel Atom boards were very popular for XP retro gaming, so long as they had what you needed, which many did not. The industrial/embedded ones were a better fit than the consumer models most of the time, because they had expandability options. I don't know of any that were specifically for Windows 98, but the pre-Atom-branding Intel offering, known as the A100/A110, should be ideal for a Windows 98 build, due to being 32-bit and single-core.

IIRC the n270/n450 class boards have a chipset which has 98 and XP support, Johnstown et al. Later than that I think you're into XP-Vista... The i965 GMA graphics probably won't be too bad for Pre-XP games, up to ~2001, at resolutions common at the time. (Yah we still get ppl bummed out that getting the "best" 1990s Voodoo doesn't get them 1600x1200 60+fps) and it may play some 2000-2005 ish "casual" games, like Sims. Those CPUs are also tolerable to use for DOSbox for emulated speeds up to low end Pentium. Natively they seem to run most stuff at about 1.4 Ghz Athlon speeds... though FPU heavy things may bog down more.

To stretch a bit further into XP territory, (including the 2 year overlap where A list games ran on both) they may do alright with a 6200PCI or 9400GT PCI or ATI 9200 PCI but are gonna be running out of steam post about 2005.

I don't know what kind of case you would have for the board, but you could use a PCI riser card to have more than 1 PCI card connected at a time.

Otherwise, the Atom should be able to handle most Retro OS's.

Big thank you to everyone who replied to this very "general" conversation starter 😀 It was a youtube vid that started me off down this line of thinking, as the person was using a modern-ish embedded board. I sat and watched it mainly because I honestly had doubts Win98 would run. It was hard enough getting it to be stable back in the day..okay it was better than 95 and when SE came out....Well it took me a long time to make the swap to XP because of how happy I was with my P3-450m, SE setup 🤣

I'll be heading up in the the loft later, so might drag out the board i have, take some pictures and post back.

A friend of mine (fellow member of our local Amiga Group), got me on to some of the tiny cases you can buy on Aliexpress, which could make for a cool little retro gaming rig. It's worth saying, I'm doing this because I have the stuff laying around. When it comes to Retro gaming, I have a IBM PC330 running a Pentium 133mhz and Orchid Righteous for period hardware. And for everything else I have a very beige, mini tower from Time Computers, which I upgraded to be a bleeding edge rig, well for 2007 at least. Otherwise by today's standards it's more, bleeding slow 😜

Here’s a really creative use of a Mini ITX with a riser: ITX and Win98

Since I last posted, someone gave me an excess to requirements K-cup holder, vertically standing. I'm wondering if I can get one of my atom boards into that. ( This one if you want to see what it looks like https://www.walmart.ca/en/ip/keurig-k-cup-cou … r/6000067503595 )

By the way, if you're into Amiga stuff, a decade back there were some Amiga oriented OSes made especially for netbooks. Many of the atom boards have same CPU/chipset/video/sound as the netbooks so having one of those working on a standalone board should be fairly straightforward.