I set myself a challenge after being inspired by philscomputerlab. I wanted a time machine PC that could cover the widest range of games possible.
So I began researching what the most compatible GPU's, motherboards, soundcards, etc were.
A few things I had learnt watching videos about the topic and searches on vogons. Specifically that the YNF744 and ESS Solo-1 were good soundcards for compatibility and that VIA motherboards had the best legacy compatibility for them while other vendors dropped it or in the case of Nvidia didn't design their boards with legacy features in mind.
Up next was graphicscards, searching the forum I found out nvidia had the widest compatibility but also had its issues in the 6000 series that I could overcome with the Voodoo card I planned to add.
I also read that Windows 98 didn't like hyperthreaded cores, but is fine with real dual cores since it will just be blind to the second core. That way I could still have extra performance in XP.
The build was mostly a success but the YMF744 i had bought for the project wasn't as compatible as I had hopes with my board. Luckily the ESS Solo-1 popped up on ebay and I ordered one. This one had decent but finnicky dos compatibility which I could workaround with two seperate drivers. And later found out I could properly fix by also changing the IRQ as well as having those two drivers.
What I didn't expect was that I'd prefer the ESS Solo-1's FM Synth over the OPL in the Yamaha card. So at this point in dos the YMF744 became redundant and I moved it to a different PC instead while ordering a Audigy 1 to compliment the ESS Solo-1's ability in Windows with EAX and soundfont support.
After that I ordered a Voodoo 2 and the project was complete (I still plan to make a proper writeup or video about the system).
The combination of Nvidia 6800GT + Voodoo 2 and ESS Solo-1 and Audigy 1 exceeded my expectations. I am very happy with the build.
The end result is that I can slow the CPU down enough to play speed sensitive dos games as slow as the 8086 era. But its also fast enough to play Crysis 1. Windows 98 has some issues with the 6800GT but these games work fine on the Voodoo 2. On even older operating systems I can fall back to a VBE driver for the 6800GT and let the Voodoo 2 do the heavy lifting. Under DOS the ESS has excellent FM synth and great compatibility, while under Windows the audigy has been doing a great job. I have managed to get the Solo-1 to run on Windows 3.11 by fixing a rare installer from an archive of their website, and likewise the Audigy runs on Windows 7 with a modded driver to.
The whole challenge was to cover a wide range, and that has definately been completed, with one interesting side effect. I never intended to build a period correct system, but it turned out the compatibility turning point of the features I wanted was 2005. So it turned out a mostly period correct 2005 PC.