I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?
Keep in mind you're not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.
That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn't work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.
One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.
I remember buying C&C Red Alert many years ago, and being completely unable to play it due to CPU speed. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen would instantly zip to the edges of the game world.
Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.
I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware
MT32-pi: https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)
Then there's the sound cards too
PicoGUS: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)
Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: https://pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing
It's been literally 20 years, but I seem to remember having more issues with XP than ME as far as Dos compatibility. I have already run into some audio troubles so a dedicated card might be the next step.
Yeah, XP would definitely have more issues. 98SE probably would have the best all around compatibility. But there are some Win95 games that only run on Windows 95. The computer you've got is really nice for the 1994 - 2001 era, though. What you could do is get a pullout tray, and have different drives with different loads, and switch them out as needed. Ultimately, if the games you want to play work, that's what matters.
I'm using an IDE-SATA adapter so swappable drive bay would be a nice solution. I'm not even sure if 95 would handle 512MB of ram, my original W95machine only had 32MB XD
Yeah, I used to run win 2000 on my desktop and had some games that I couldn't play from the win95 era. So I resized my mom's old windows XP machine and pulled a 2 gig partition out then installed win98 on that. I used the windows disk manager to mark the partition I wanted to boot from as active, so it was completely transparent to my mom when she would need to use the computer, including booting.
If I were going to do a system like this again today, id probably do something similar. An MBR formatted hard drive can have 4 primary partitions. FAT16 had a max partition size of 2gb, but fat32 was introduced in win98 so you could go with whatever partition size you wanted there.
So you could have a 95, 98, ME, and XP installation all on one drive and just switch between them using the drive manager to change the active bootable partition then rebooting.
After messing around for a couple of days now I might try a dual boot between 98 and ME. I haven't had any stability issues but this particular hardware doesn't play well with Dos and audio under ME 🙃. Thanks for the info!