This is not an optimal PC for DOS games. Too fast for many games on real hardware, too slow for emulation.

It will run XP (may be better to leave at SP2, they say that SP3 gets really heavy), so you can dual-boot XP and Win98 SE, or XP and WinME (if you are willing to give up pure DOS mode). XP should be more compatible with games than Win2K.

I recommend bumping the RAM to 512MB if possible (and if you end up dumping W98, then maybe even 1GB for XP...)

Aren't those FF7 mods designed with modern operating systems in mind? Not sure why you'd want to play modded FF7 on a retro rig. Because of the XG music perhaps?

In terms of specs, your system is fine for playing most Win9x games. Late DOS games should also work quite well. Older, speed sensitive DOS titles might run if you disable both caches on your CPU, but it's not guaranteed. Lastly, without SB-Link, the DOS compatibility of PCI sound cards is hit and miss, depending mostly the motherboard.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2021-09-07, 16:46:

Aren't those FF7 mods designed with modern operating systems in mind? Not sure why you'd want to play modded FF7 on a retro rig. Because of the XG music perhaps?

In terms of specs, your system is fine for playing most Win9x games. Late DOS games should also work quite well. Older, speed sensitive titles might run if you disable both caches on your CPU, but it's not guaranteed. Without SB-Link, the DOS compatibility of PCI sound cards is hit and miss, depending mostly the motherboard.

Yea XG music mostly, plus older games like it just don't seem right to play on a modern system. I don't care for overhauls, just wanted to play New Threat with XG music and the 60fps fix, the latter is the only thing I haven't gotten working yet, which I'm not sure if that requires the OGL drivers. If it doesn't, then I can forgo that and I can just use D3D or software (D3D mode tends to shift rows of pixels so text looks wobbly, but the TNT2 doesn't have that issue so I can just swap it out if I want to play it). The problem is that it's part of the Reunion mod, which also replaces the music with PS1 ogg files with no option to stick with midi, and deleting those from the install simply disables the music entirely, which I don't want, and I have no idea if it makes registry changes. If it does, that's something I need to look through and find out. Can't seem to find just the 60fps fix by itself, but I heard 7th Heaven has it, I just haven't had time to look around. I'm guessing it just reverts it to handle how PS1 does, limiting/duplicating frames in specific scenarios, which to me seems like a CPU thing and not GPU.

Also looking at dr_st's advice, I may bump it up to 512MB as well since that was something I was already thinking of doing. I hadn't messed with older PCs but I'm just starting to get the hang of it.

Can't blame you for wanting XG music in FF7, it does sound exceptional.

I'm not too familiar with FF7 modding, but check if there's a fix for mini games running too fast. Otherwise, you may have some problems with the bike race and snowboard sections of the game.