First post, by Dandelion212
Hi! Been a long ass time since I've posted on a dedicated forum, and will admit it's very nostalgic.
So, some backstory: In either late 2008 or early 2009, my dad and I built the ultimate Windows XP rig for me. Baby's first gaming PC. It was, infact, so damn good, that I used it through 2015. I played through Life Is Strange as the episodes came out through that year with absolutely zero problems in performance (despite XP being unsupported), but after that was about when games stopped refusing to run with XP as an operating system as a whole. I switched to a laptop after that, needing portability as a college student. Unfortunately, my dad ended up trashing it along with his old build from 2006 once he upgraded as well.
One thing I've missed majorly is how good my games from that era ran on that computer. Specifically the Sims franchise. I do not know what it is about Windows 10, but it runs the Sims 3, a notoriously jacked game for 2009, somehow even worse than it did on my poor desktop did as its fans screamed for their life. It runs the Sims 2 with major graphical errors that are annoying and sometimes inconsistent to fix, and doesn't run the original game at all. I also have a stash of like 50+ old CD-ROMS from my childhood I'd love to try out again. Pretty sure we've even got an actual copy of XP kicking around somewhere. I've tried VMs, but the patches and workarounds required for even a glimmer of hope for running some of these things... it's just too much of a hassle. I just wanna run the stuff on the real hardware and ditch the modern issues. I also just like, miss XP, dude.
Now, apologies if it sounds like I'm talking out my ass on half of this -- that's because I am. I know pretty much 10% of what I'm doing here. I know how to put parts together and how to google tutorials and fixes for things very well, and it's gotten me this far.
From that extensive searching, I've gathered that building a retro PC from scratch can be rather difficult and expensive with sourcing parts, so I'm prepared to go goodwill and ebay/marketplace hunting for a pre-built to modify as a compromise. I guess I'm wondering what kind of types of machines/years I might want to look for to use as a base and upgrade as needed for gaming. If I'm remembering correctly, I had a GeForce 8800 GTX in my PC. I have no idea what kind of CPU I had, but I know it was dual core. Sims 3 is extremely CPU heavy so I want something compatible with as late/good of a CPU as possible, while still being compatible with the x86 version of XP, since most of my old CD-ROMS are not x64 compatible.
