I'd love to have a separate PC for each age of gaming, in fact I'd love to have a separate PC for each year in gaming starting with a 1983 IBM PC XT and ending with the latest and greatest. With that said I just don't have the space for that kind of thing, with a fairly small room and only enough space for one desk really, juggling between the few PCs I currently own is a major PITA, I have to disconnect and unmount everything, take off the one that's on the desk, put it in the corner next to the others, take another and mount and connect everything... So I've been considering as of late ways to have a setup that is always on the desk and ready to use at a moment's notice that would still allow me to play any game I wish and have the best possible experience out of it as well. After lots and lots of research and digging on google for reviews of obscure parts, I think I'm finally onto something.

The main attraction can be the Phanteks Mini XL double system case, which can fit two systems inside, a mITX and a mATX system. It can sit on the left side of the desk.The mITX system can be a modern windows 10 system with say an amd ryzen and gtx 1060 or whatever, something I can upgrade every year, selling the older parts, to ensure I always have a relevant machine for the latest games. It wouldn't need a sound card as modern games don't make use of one anyways, an USB DAC or whatever will be all it needs for sound.

The mATX system in the same case can most likely be a win98se machine taking care of the majority of retro gaming. It's a bit hard picking the perfect parts for it, but I think I've more or less made up my mind on what to look for. To begin with, I'm not sure if I want it to do any DOS gaming or not, more on that later. So if the mATX system won't need to do any DOS gaming, only windows gaming, I think the higher the performance the better, and, the 2 absolute best platforms for a high performance win98se machine appear to be Pentium M and Turion 64. Pentium M is a bit of a problem, a compatible desktop matx motherboard would be the Asus P4P800-VM, but theres a problem, it needs Asus CT-479 socket adapter thats really rare and hard to find, and also the socket is very high up on the motherboard, and considering the graphics card of the other system in that case overhangs the mATX system a bit, it will probably not allow fitting any cpu cooler at all. The Turion 64 seems to be the way to go, it being a regular socket 754 compatible cpu, theres a fairly wide range of compatible motherboards, and some of them have the socket lower down, so it will probably fit ok. After a quick google search I noted down AOpen S760GXm-S, not sure if it would work for this as it's SiS chipset, not VIA, I don't know if SiS is any good at win9x, but it does have drivers for win9x at least. Theres other similar motherboards too so it doesnt necessarily have to be this one. Graphics card, well, 6800 GT is the fastest, but lacking some features like table fog and 8bit palletized textures. FX 5950 Ultra has them, but drivers are maybe a bit too new, I think the oldest driver it can use is 56-something, I've read that for win9x its best to use 45.23, so the fastest card that can do this driver would be the FX 5900 Ultra. NGlide can take care of 3dfx stuff. Sound card is obvious, Aureal Vortex 2. There's different versions but I think Diamond Monster Sound MX300 is supposed to have the highest sound quality out of them. Also having an Audigy 2 ZS alongisde it may be good as theres some win9x games that support EAX but not A3D. For storage, no need to bother with old hard drives, CompactFlash with a PCI bracket so it can be replaced from the back of the case seems to be the best solution, I can have several cards with different installations, say one with win98se and drivers for the vortex 2, another with win98se and drivers for the audigy 2 zs, a third may have win 2000 or XP.

On the other side of the desk I can have another PC, that should fill in the blank between win9x and win10, so it will have to run winXP, win7, or both, and have a creative X-Fi sound card... well, really one of the Auzen models like a Prelude or HomeTheater HD would be best. I think there shouldnt be many winXP games that dont work perfectly fine in win7. Maybe some of the oldest ones, but those should work just fine on the win98 system. Well, Far Cry comes to mind, having broken water reflections and being too new for the win98 system, but probably not worth having a winXP system just for one game. I guess the system will have the i7-5775c, which is the fastest cpu for gaming that also works perfectly with win7, and whatever maxwell or pascal graphics card fits well with it, maybe like a 1080ti once you can find one for cheap used a few years from now, and something older and cheaper like a GTX 780 until then. I have the perfect case for this, Silverstone Fortress FT02, it has great cooling at fairly low noise levels and looks nice, also because of its innovative rotated motherboard, the window is on the other side of the case, so it will be great for sitting on the right side of the desk while the Phanteks with the win98 and win10 systems is on the left.

So that leaves DOS gaming. I left this for later because it's a bit of a complex thing. Sure I can go with a less capable win98se machine with 440bx chipset and pentium 3 and try to run both windows and DOS games on it, but it will be too fast for many speed sensitive DOS games, and too slow for late win9x games to run at high resolutions and framerates. I'd rather have the win98 system do windows games only and be high performance for them. So then, about DOS, I could maybe make a dedicated DOS-only PC in a horizontal desktop case that will sit on the desk under the monitor. I have a fairly good idea of what specs that PC should have, a Pentium 200 seems to be the best choice of CPU, its fast enough for late DOS games like Quake and Duke3D, but it can also be easily underclocked to 100mhz or even 75mhz, also caches can be disabled, so it can mimic a 386 or a 486 system too. For graphics an S3 Virge combined with Voodoo 1 seems to be the way to go, and for sound something with OPL3 like a Sound Blaster Pro 2, 16, or an early AWE32 model. Optionally Gravis UltraSound ACE can be added alongside it, not sure if needed though, because for MIDI it would be best to just use a Roland Sound Canvas. I know theres software emulation for that too, in case I cant find a real one or I dont want it taking up extra space. With all that said, I found a thread discussing how if DOSBox is properly configured, it looks and sounds pretty accurate to the real thing, and it having configurable CPU speed, any speed sensitive games should be not a problem too, especially since some games require a 286 or even an 8086 to run well. So, I'm not sure if theres any good reason to have an actual DOS PC taking up space, its probably better to just use DOSBox?

To connect all that I bet I will need a KVM switch or two, and Im not sure if a single LCD monitor is ok or I will want to run a CRT alongside it, CRTs are nice but they're so bulky and power inefficient... Sure they display any resolution perfectly, but I wonder, scaling on a 1080p screen is fairly bad, but, on a 1440p and especially 4K screen I think low resolutions for retro gaming upscalled should look pretty close to perfect, no? Well, if I have to keep a CRT, with a large enough desk its surely possible to have a CRT and a LCD side by side, but if I can go with just an LCD without really worsening retro gaming experience that would be nice.

So what are your opinions? Is there anything you would change in this setup to make it even better, or I've already pretty much nailed it and should start stalking ebay?