Welcome to VOGONS and congrats on this build undertaking! Mid 90s Pentium systems are one of my favs to build, so I hope you enjoy the process.

To answer some of your questions:

Case & Motherboard (AT vs ATX)

This might depend mainly on budget and availability. The advantage of ATX is they are newer and more common, especially among thrift shops (at least where I live). Whereas AT systems are older and may be harder to come by. You can build a Pentium MMX 200 out of either since the release of that processor coincided with the switch from the AT to ATX format.

Some cases can accommodate both AT and ATX motherboards if they have the appropriate screw holes on the motherboard tray.

RAM

64 MB of RAM will be plenty for a DOS/Win 95 machine. 16 to 32MB would have been more common at the time. Some chipsets (i.e Intel 430VX/TX) can't cache more than 64MB anyway.

Power Supply

200W should be plenty. I typically use 200W to 250W supplies with systems of this era.

Drives

Unless you have a specific need for it, I'd skip the 5.25" drive as those were being phased out at that time. For CD-ROM options it depends on a couple things. I prefer older slower CD-ROMS (e.g. 4x to 8x) because they are quiet. However, if you are using burned CD-R discs, they might not be compatible with older drives. Whereas newer drives tend to be faster and louder, but can potentially be slowed down with software applications (depending on the drive).

Hard Drive

I use 4GB Compact Flash cards with systems of that era for a few reasons. 1) They are quiet and fast. 2) They can be easily plugged into a modern PC for file transfers. 3) I can have different cards with different operating systems installed and then just insert whatever OS I want to use.

Graphics Cards

At the time it was typical to have two graphics cards, one for 2D graphics and a Voodoo card for 3D. Personally my favorite choice for a Pentium MMX system is a Riva 128 PCI card and a Voodoo1. I prefer the Riva 128 over the S3 cards because the former has better image quality and speed in DOS.

Sound Card(s)

Sound cards under DOS can be a huge can of worms. I'm not a huge fan of Sound Blaster cards as a first choice, mainly due to there being a lot of different models each with various trade offs. This thread has more details: Sound Blaster: From best to worst

Even for a sound card like the AWE32 there are eight different models with different chips, features and trade-offs depending on the model.

My preference for DOS gaming is to usually use multiple sound cards. For example, something like a Yamaha YMF-71x card for SB/SB Pro, OPL3, and MIDI support, and a Sound Blaster 32 (CT3670) or AWE64 (CT4500 / CT4390) for Sound Blaster 16 / AWE32 support.

Operating System

As mentioned above, I like using CF cards so I can easily switch between operating systems like DOS 6.22 and Windows 95. Most commonly at the time would be installing Windows 95 and then just booting into DOS if you wanted to run things from DOS.

Monitor

CRT is definitely the way to go if you can find one in good working condition. Sony Trinitron based monitors are my preference, but can be pricey due to being sought after. For games of that era, resolutions like 320x200 and 640x480 would be the most common you'll use. Maybe up to 800x600 depending on the game. Most CRT monitors you're likely to find would probably support up to 1024x768 anyway.

Hi and thanks for the welcome!

Some great advice there especially around the Compact Flash cards i guess that would be a lot simpler and i assume you can load the DOS/Windows 95 operating systems onto them via a modern pc... Or would it still be required to use the retro pc to do that?

I'll go away adn do some more research though undoubtedly will be asking lot's more questions but this is a great starting point, i can't wait to get back into some point and clicks

Renno1983 wrote on 2025-09-02, 21:35:

Some great advice there especially around the Compact Flash cards i guess that would be a lot simpler and i assume you can load the DOS/Windows 95 operating systems onto them via a modern pc... Or would it still be required to use the retro pc to do that?

I partition, format and install operating systems all on the retro PC. Only thing I use my modern PC is either to erase partitions or transfer files.

For CF cards, brand and model seems quite important. I've had good success using genuine Sandisk cards and Verbatim branded cards. The latter used to be available through Amazon, but it doesn't seem they sell them any more. You might be able to get some from Ebay.

I also use Startech or Syba branded CF-to-IDE adapters.

I'll go away adn do some more research though undoubtedly will be asking lot's more questions but this is a great starting point, i can't wait to get back into some point and clicks

Happy to help. I've built a number of retro Pentium PCs over the past few years, so more than happy to share what experience I have.

Hi,

First thing you probably want to decide is how OK you are with using modern components. I absolutely prefer using modern "quality of life" improvements, like modern cases, PSUs, drives, fans, etc. Many people are more period-accurate purists. The advantage of using modern components is that it gives you a smoother experience (in some regards) and lets you focus more on gaming or fiddling with video/sound and that kind of thing. The disadvantage, of course, is that it doesn't fully capture the feel or nostalgia of using original hardware.

Good choice on P200MMX. That's what I use in my main DOS machine. S3 ViRGE or Trio64 or something like that should be sufficient for video. Only bother with a Voodoo if you're really into the games that utilize it. I wouldn't go with more than 64 MB of RAM (but 32 is probably enough). I recall, at least, that Crusader: No Remorse doesn't function correctly with more than 64 MB of RAM. For sound, it really comes down to how much you care about it. I use a Yamaha YMF-71X paired with a Sound Blaster 16, and a Wavetable-Pi for emulated MT-32 and General MIDI (I highly recommend this route if you don't want to spend the money on the real thing). The SB16 (or AWE32) is good for later DOS games that support SB16, but certainly the SB16 has flaws that the YMF-71X makes up for, and finding the "right" SB16 model is a lot of work.

For CD-ROM drive, if you care about noise, try to find something that works with CDBeQuiet! ( https://tools.dosforum.de/ ) if you're going to be using anything beyond the earliest drive models. Unfortunately, this often requires trial and error because a quite a few drives (in my experience) do not work with CDBQ.

For HDDs, I've always used SDDs with SATA-IDE adapters. Just so easy to use and never had a problem - although others might disagree.

Welcome,
Looks like you have done your research, and can understand it may seem a bit overwhelming at this point but it's really not. a lot falls into place by itself.

Many of your decisions will be made for you due to price and availability. Worst thing you can do is have your hart set on 1 specific part and exclude yourself from other options.
but to answer your questions

Case
Desktop's are more compact, you can stack them or put the monitor on top. However they have less space.
Towers are more common (easier to find) more drive bays but take up more space.

AT cases are very hard to find. ATX are cheap common, and you can either go with a modern case with good airflow or period correct.
Your motherboard will ultimate decided AT or ATX, desktop or tower comes down to personal choice.

Motherboard
Personally I'd prefer ATX due to case supply. I'd also prefer PS2 mouse over serial, coin battery over barrel or Dallas chip but the main deciding factor would be what I can get for a fair price.

RAM
agree 64MB is more then enough. again the motherboard will decide what type.

Power Supply.
If going modern which is recommended 200 is fine. Personally I prefer modular ones so you can remove the unwanted PCE-E and SATA connecters.

Drives
I'd agree with dropping the 5 1/4 drive unless you have a specific need.
I'd recommend a gotek for your 1.44Mb drive and whatever IDE CD-Drive you have lying around or can get for cheap, speeds not really going to matter.

Hard Drive.
I like the sound of spinning rust so would go with either an IDE or SATA using an adapter. Be aware motherboards of this era will max out probably at 120GB at best, and many will be much less.
CF or SD cards are good for pure dos machines but I don't really like them for Win9x, but that's comes down to personal taste.

Graphics
If going with a Voodoo1 you need a 2nd card anyway as it only does Glide.
I like to choose something from this list so I can play with other versions of 3D games. (however it's just for experimentations, most of the time the versions are inferior to the plain version)
3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

Soundcard
As you have decided you don't want an external midi device like the Roland you don't have to worry about midi bugs.
AWE32 is a good choice but aren't cheep. Yamaha and ESS AudioDrive are popular cheaper alternatives. All have pro's and cons. you will find ALOT of info here about all 3

OS
Also agree no need for both Windows and dos 6.22, "MS Dos 7" that sits underneath Win9x is a lot nicer in many ways like FAT32 and long filename support. 99.9% of the time games will just work with only the really REALLY 80's era old games that don't.

CRT
This really will depend on what's available. they are heavy and fragile to ship so if you can get something local then great.
I'd say 15-19 inch is the sweet spot.

I'd keep an eye on freecyle.org I got a number of CRT's from there from time to time

Intel 430HX-based motherboards in ATX pop up on ebay once in a while; that is about as early as you can get ATX, aside from Triton. There's an ECX P5HX-A on there, new old stock, under $100 free shipping. You are fortunate with Pentium MMX that you don't have crazed 486 or Super7 buyers competing with you for these (no AGP, no 100 MHz operation, no UltraDMA helps keep them away).

I can tell you on the 430HX (PIIX3), JMicron-based (cheap) IDE to Toshiba 1TB SATA hard drive does work as long as DMA in Win9x is kept shut off. I have not thoroughly tested other configurations than that on mine. These SATA-IDE things are extremely flaky, for example, my 1TB WD HDD will not work.

Case
AT or ATX? horizontal or tower? pro's and con's to each?

AT. It's more appropriate for an MMX system. PII/III is when ATX really hit its stride. You may want a modern power supply to protect your vintage components though, in which case you will have to use an adapter.

Motherboard
Really not sure in this depeartment as there seem to be so many choices so I welcome any suggestions. will an AT motherboard fit in an ATX case?

I don't think AT motherboards are compatible with ATX cases. And they mostly have AT keyboard connectors, which an AT case has a special hole for that an ATX case does not. I would personally recommend a 386/486 builder's tower as I think they look nicer, but it's ultimately a matter of personal preference.

Ram
This one i am confused with so many choices yet again and i guess it would depend on what mother board i get. Is 64mb the sweet spot or should i be looking at 128mb or just 32mb and what type?

An MMX system will do well with 64MB of SDRAM. Many motherboards use Intel chipsets that will only cache 64MB anyway.

Power supply
Would a 200w power supply be suffient for the early 3d era games?

I would go higher. 300-400W or something.

Drives
Looking to have 3.5" floppy drive, 5.25" floppy drive and a CD Drive(not sure what speed)

Good. Your CD options are IDE for convenience or proprietary Mitsumi or Sony or Panasonic (or something) interface to connect to your Sound Blaster if you use an SB16 CD edition.

Hard Drive
Seen a lot of people go with a sata HDD using an IDE adapter. Is this the best way or stick to a proper original IDE HDD?

Again a matter of personal preference. If you go for a "solid state drive", though, use a nice Sandisk compact flash card with an adapter. A proper IDE HDD is lots of fun, but you will have to source one that is still working, or deal with capacity issues due to lack of proper BIOS LBA support.

Graphics card
Should i go for 1 card fits all or 2 cards? I was thinking something like an S3 Virge for 2d era DOS games and maybe a voodoo 1 for the early 3d era games. Or is there a good option that would do both?

I always shill the S3 Trio64 series as it is fast and is king for DOS compatibility. Pairs well with a Voodoo 1. Virge is fine though.

Sound card
Again after research it seem like an AWE 32 would be a good mid price card. Not reallty wanting to pay the money for a Roland MT-32 and all that entails but would like a good quality card tha tdoes midi well as i love the classic sountracks to the late DOS/Win95 era games

AWE64 is not out of the question either.

Operating System
Most likely DOS 6.22 and Win95 whats the best way of getting these loaded onto the system? Dual boot? Back in the day i would use a bootable floppy or cd is there another way without having the device drivers loaded after first assembling the components.

Two partitions, use BOOTMGRX from BTTR Software to manage them (create DOS partition first, install DOS on it, hide it, run Win95 setup on 2nd partition, reinstate BOOTMGRX from floppy, unhide DOS partition)
Load DOS with a bootable floppy with all of the DOS utilities you care about already in the DOS folder
Load Windows 95 by copying contents of Win95 CD to a folder called "WIN95" in your Win95 partition. You will then run SETUP from that folder and also point the driver wizard to it when it starts looking for drivers so you don't have to keep inserting the CD over and over.
Having a compact flash card helps with this process tremendously.

Monitor
Definitely going for a CRT not an LCD. Any brands to avoid? Looking at around a 17" What resolutions were used up to 1996/97 era Win95 and will the monitor display the low resolutions of the early DOS games fine too?

800x600. 1024x768 if you're adventurous. Yes any CRT will do low res fine. Find a Trinitron if you can. They're Sony, but Dell also used those tubes in some of their monitors.

Additional notes:

I would go to 233 MHz. You will enjoy the extra headroom in early 3D games.
Use Socket 7, not Socket 5. A Super Socket 7 board will give you potential to upgrade to AMD K6-2 or K6-3 later on.
Get yourself a 3Com 3C509 ethernet card and hook it up to your network. Use MTCP's FTP and/or FTPSRV utilities to copy files back and forth. You can also access cool old websites in Windows 95 this way using Netscape or IE. Also you can set up network shares that you can access with Windows 95 if you use samba on Linux and turn the SMB version all the way down.

Renno1983 wrote on 2025-09-02, 19:56:

Motherboard
Really not sure in this depeartment as there seem to be so many choices so I welcome any suggestions. will an AT motherboard fit in an ATX case?

Shponglefan wrote on 2025-09-02, 20:44:

Some cases can accommodate both AT and ATX motherboards if they have the appropriate screw holes on the motherboard tray.

This is a 486 (Baby AT) motherboard in a Cooler Master Elite 350 case. It isn't beige, but it's a respectful-looking black case for such a system.
As you can see, this case can handle a motherboard as wide as a 486 VLB one. Many cases have now gone to the motherboard tray having a depression to hold the board, and will only take one about 9.6" wide. So it requires some curation if your board is wider than that. Many Socket 7 boards are narrower, but if they have a COAST slot, might be just as wide as a 486 VLB.
If there are enough of us here who do these reverse-stealth builds, perhaps a thread dedicated to the purpose would be nice.

Note that I should really move the 3xAA elsewhere or put lithium primary AA in it that would be less likely to leak.

I would actually suggest getting the 86box emulator. It emulates a lot of different hardware and so you can experiment with different configurations and see what you like. You can do things like access each motherboard's BIOS setup, try out drivers for the various emulated hardware, setup different storage configurations, etc. It's fun. You can get familiar with DOS and Win9x again too. There's even Voodoo support.

keenmaster486 wrote on Yesterday, 02:19:

I would go to 233 MHz. You will enjoy the extra headroom in early 3D games.
Use Socket 7, not Socket 5. A Super Socket 7 board will give you potential to upgrade to AMD K6-2 or K6-3 later on.

+1 on these recommendations. I have a P200 MMX which I have overclocked to 225 MHz simply by configuring my socket 7 Shuttle HOT-569 FSB at 75 MHz. Easy and low risk overclock. I briefly tried going 83 MHz but the system was not stable, most likely because the memory could not follow the pace but I did not want to investigate further and I am happy with my P200 running 225 MHz.

That board also offers dual voltage and accept K6-2/2+.

My setup (with a Voodoo Banshee which is a bit at the edge of the period correctness I reckon) runs 3D game such as Motoracer, gl-Quake and Quake 2 without problem, Half-life is a bit slow but still playable.

Thanks for all the replies while I was sleeping. Going to look into some more of this while working my boring office job today. Happy to keep the suggestions going

IMO.

This hardware is not new, you can not just go and buy what you've decided. Unless you want something very specific for some personal reason it makes sense to roughly decide what you are aiming for and then check out local marketplaces and see what you can find and what is not stupidly expensive.

Building around what's actually available and not theoretical "the best" options would allow you to do it for a reasonable price within a reasonable amount of time. This also means you have to be ready for compromises, can not always have "the best" or even just specific things you wanted...

May be you'll get lucky and find something people consider impractically rare, or may be something considered common is not available to you locally - it happens all the time.

You should also be careful with the fact that a lot of this hardware requires repairs. Dead capacitors are extremely common, even though this hardware predates capacitor plague. Mechanical stuff like floppy or CD may require disassembling, cleaning and replacement of degraded parts like belts. Fans are often dead. Etc. So you have to be either prepared to deal with it, or if you do not want to - look for parts which have been already worked on. This can be more risky and will be more expensive, but at least the stuff should be functional right away.

In some cases it can be entirely avoided by using modern parts too. Like if you use modern PSU you do not have to worry about dead capacitors there, etc.

Hi thanks for responding. I absolutely agree with what you have said and at the minute the only definites are a pentium mmx and CRT monitor. The rest of the build will be around what fits the processor/mb combo I end up with.
Power supply will most likely be a modern one as i don't see the point in sourcing an old one jus to supply power to a system(there's no nostalgia in that) I do however want to use the physical media I own on the rig so HDD, cd drive and floppy drives are going to be period correct.... maybe not the hdd as i may go ssd-ide adapter route

Regarding power supplies, if you end up with an AT motherboard you'll either need an adapter with a modern ATX supply or likely go with a vintage AT power supply. I would not recommend sourcing a modern AT power supply. I made the mistake of buying a couple and they ended up being cheap junk that I didn't trust using with a vintage PC.

The other issue you might run into is compatibility of modern power supplies with early ATX motherboards. I have run into the issue with a Pentium II (if I remember correctly) motherboard that wouldn't work with a modern ATX PSU.

The third issue is modern power supplies don't supply -5V. Some older hardware require -5V (usually certain sound cards). A work around for this is using something like a Voltage Blaster to supply -5V to the ISA slots.

Looks like the best bet would be the modern ATX power supply with an AT adapter.

I'll have a look into what required the -5v rail

Off the top of my head, I think there are some old model Sound Blasters, Pro Audio Spectrum cards, and the Roland LAPC-I that require -5V.

It's a somewhat niche requirement so you're not likely to need it.

[/quote]
At the time it was typical to have two graphics cards, one for 2D graphics and a Voodoo card for 3D. Personally my favorite choice for a Pentium MMX system is a Riva 128 PCI card and a Voodoo1. I prefer the Riva 128 over the S3 cards because the former has better image quality and speed in DOS.
[/quote]

With regards to the Riva 128 PCI card does it need to be PCI or is AGP ok too as I see more AGP cards than PCI on ebay?

An AGP card will require a motherboard with an AGP slot. You'd need a super socket 7 motherboard with an AGP slot that could also use a Pentium MMX processor.

It's better to sort out the motherboard + processor first before getting into graphics cards.

I do think it would be a good idea to get a motherboard with AGP, if possible. If nothing else - because it gives more options, sometimes better and often cheaper options.

As much as AGP videocards can be expensive - interesting PCI stuff is even worse...