For 80's and early 90's era of Sierra games (EGA to VGA), you don't need anything faster than a 286. A 486 DX2/66 is overkill, as these were games built to run on early 8088/8086 or 286 processors (early 90's).

The early EGA Sierra games were also designed to be processor limited. Anything over ~8 MHz or so is actually too fast for those games (when set to the fastest setting). Tandy 1000's are arguably the best for those games since they also allow the 3-channel Tandy sound, which is better than the PC Speaker back in the day.

You can use faster machines, but you might to use something like MoSlo to speed limit the games accordingly.

For anything beyond that a 486 DX2/66 would run everything up to and including the CD/SVGA Sierra adventures (Gabriel Knight, Phantasmagoria, etc.).

DOSBOX/SCUMMVM paired with MUNT, S-YXG50, and VSC-MP1 for MIDI will check the boxes for the classic Sierra adventure games and those from others. You can certainly get those working well on a solid XP build. I can't speak for how well they would currently work on your 98 build.

Either my 386 33Mhz or my 486 33Mhz connected to MT-32 seems to work fine for those.

You will want to have an intelligent mode MIDI card for use with the MT-32 if you are using it on an older system.
On a fast enough system you can get by with using SoftMPU.

Ok so I guess reading through this, is there any reason my W98 computer would be a bad choice? Maybe I could run a TSR like MoSlo to slow things down? Maybe this makes more sense than investing in yet more hardware.

cloverskull wrote on 2022-05-08, 22:59:

Ok so I guess reading through this, is there any reason my W98 computer would be a bad choice? Maybe I could run a TSR like MoSlo to slow things down? Maybe this makes more sense than investing in yet more hardware.

Both your Win 98 rig and XP rig (via Dosbox) could run them just fine.

It all comes down to what your goal is. If the goal is just to play the games regardless of the system they are running on, then anything from a classic 8086 machine to a modern Windows 10 system can do that.

Alternatively, if the goal is to run them on period-specific hardware, that's only reason to invest in a system or two from that era.

If you're talking early Sierra, then you mean games using AGI. Those are technically CGA (or whatever you call the PCjr mode), though I think there were patches or re-releases to make them work on EGA/VGA with the 16 colours. For those you want an 808x or slow 286. For me the best way to enjoy them s in DOSbox, especially for the titles that only do 16 colour graphics in composite mode so you don't need to look at an old flickery TV monitor. The DOSbox composite emulation is really nice because it gives you colours that EGA can't reproduce, and you also get filters for stuff like scanlines or edge smoothing. Back in the olden days I was never happy playing the early titles because they looked like ass in CGA colours on my 486.

Cool cool. Thanks everyone. I think this makes up my mind for me. There is a part of me that would be interested in figuring out the best possible performance 486, but maybe that's for totally unrelated reasons to Sierra games. I think I'll probably be in good shape with all of this for now 😀