I was quite young and there wasn't much extra money in the household at the time, so an Am5x86 machine (incidentally, with an MB-8433UUD inside) with a 1MB Cirrus 5446 SVGA, and one of those ESS 1 something-something 8 sound cards. Pretty boring stuff then, but "ultimate 486" territory now.
I knew my way around DOS because I had picked up the book, Running MS-DOS at a yard sale. That was what made command line make sense. I heard about Commander Keen on the school bus, later ran into it on ftp.cdrom.com, liked it, got parents to buy the full versions around that time, maybe a year before. It was downloadable from DigitalRiver. Steam before Steam. Via that I discovered the other apogee shareware games, the main one being Wacky Wheels.
I played with a lot of other DOS shareware from ftp.cdrom.com, wuarchive.wustl.edu, ftp.simtel.net, ftp.tucows.com and the like. I recall a murder mystery game, not that was interesting in itself, but that came with something called VIEWER.EXE that could display .gif and other formats from DOS. Another game, ThePackRat, had corrupted text on that 486 but correct text on the older DX2-66. It was just an interesting curiosity back then, later I heard that the video BIOS (or maybe system BIOS) reused the space for some old CGA era font for other data, and the game was reading it from that hardcoded location and interpreting whatever was there as those characters. I believe there may be a TSR that fixes this on the 5446. When people ask, what do you do with this old hardware, sometimes it's solve old mysteries like that.