Just out of curiousity, do any of you have older gaming rigs?

Have you built any of these older systems for running old games on? What parts did you pick and for what games?

I've considered buying a used Pentium 3 system off Ebay so I could build the ulltimate Windows 98 system for some older games. Not sure it's worth the nostalgia, but it would kind of fun though.

As for older games I ended up buying a used Mini-ATX WIN10 system with a GTX1060 and it seems to run most of the games I have in my library.

The only 'old' equipment I have is a 4:3 lcd 19'' monitor, which I intend to use for old games without widescreen patches, such as some old dos games that I don't want to play stretched out, nor with black bars at the side of the screen. I took it off someone that was going to throw it away.

Apart from that, most old games I play or want to play work fine, or has been rebuilt/retouched to work fine on modern systems. In some cases, like openrct2, stronghold, constructor, dune 2000 and dungeon keeper 2, I think modern work on them have really fixed all issues that in the past would've required the use of an old rig / virtual system to circumvent.

Are there any old games you want to play that you think a retro rig is necessary for? Or is it mostly for nostalgia's sake?

Until recently I had a Win 98 PC using a PII-350 with a Nvidia Riva TNT and SB Live card. It was hooked up to my old 22" Mitsubishi CRT. It was for my old disc based DOS and early windows games. Basically it was my main PC between about '98-00

However recently I got back into playing those old games on my CRT and decided to rebuild my old retro PC with some parts I had lying around.

So currently it uses a PIII based Celeron 633, still with the Sound Blaster Live card. I didn't have anything to use as a decent graphics card but found an ATI card from early 00's (can't remember right now which model). The system still runs Win 98 with a DOS config boot file to reboot into true DOS, since that's the entire point of the retro system. I do have a Celeron 1GHz to go in place of the 633 but the heat sink clip is broken and I have to find some lockwire to lock it down. It also has an original working Orchid Righteous 3dfx card- the very first ones that still had mechanical relays for switching in. Collectors item!

Even with a 633 Celeron it still has more CPU and GPU power to run anything from the 90's at my monitors max refresh rate at any of it's capable resolutions. The one issue I'm having with it is poor video compatibility in some DOS games which I've traced to the ATI cards terrible legacy DOS driver support. I can always put the TNT back though.

After building a new main PC recently I rebuilt my old Core 2 Quad with it's Radeon HD7770 as a legacy 32 bit XP machine since I have been fully expecting Win 10 to have compatibility issues with a lot of old 32 bit games. But so far no issues have arisen with Win 10...so the 32 bit machine isn't getting any love.

Incidentally those old games look far better on a CRT without any upscaling than they do on even the best LCD/LED technology.

My previous rig is probably retro now, a delightfully tiny Dell Optiplex 780, one of the last BIOS powered devices located in the house.

I thought about it but personally I'm lucky enough that everything I want to run does run on modern hardware with a combination of tweaking, source ports and compatibility patches (eg, DirectDrawFix). The main advantages of doing this are 1. Lightning fast load times on SSD's, 2. Widescreen in more games, 3. Much lower heat / noise / power consumption and 4. It's a lot easier to source replacement components if something dies.

I still have our first computer AST Bravo 4/66, originally it had:
- 66 MHz Cyrix CPU
- 8 MB RAM
- 500 MB HDD
- Sound Blaster 16 ASP SCSI-2 and a CD-ROM drive connected though it
- DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11, if we had bough the computer a few months later it would have been infected with Win95...

Almost immediately after a Gravis Ultrasound MAX with 1 MB RAM was also added to keep company with the SB16.

Over the years RAM has been increased to 28 MB and another HDD was added, a 2.5 GB Quantum BigFoot that lasted about a year, but one we got from warranty has been fine ever since. A lot later I replaced the CPU with an Intel 486 DX2 100 MHz and after I failed to get the computer to boot from a CF-card adapter, I finally replaced the old HDDs with a pair of 8 GB HDDs.

For Win9x games I have a Pentium MMX 233 MHz with Win98SE, ET6000, Voodoo 1 and a motherboard with a BIOS update that supports HDDs under the 137 GB limit.

I can still barely get up an running a computer with a 1.4 GHz Tualatin based Celeron on a slot-in adapter, but the motherboard is in dire need of capacitor replacement just like my other computer with a 700 MHz slot-in Pentium III.
I have been planning to strip parts from them for a third motherboard that still seems to have its capacitors intact, but first I need to get a better case with at least two 5.25" slots and six 3.5" HDD trays that are not meant to be accessed from the motherboard's back-plate side.

Once that project is done, I will again have a 1.4 GHz computer with 640 MB RAM, Geforce 4800 Ti, 2x Voodoo 2, Gravis Ultrasound Extreme, Hercules Game Theater XP and a Promise PATA adapter for the 137+ HDDs. It should work great with almost anything between games that it can't slow down enough with Mo'slo and games that play just fine with modern hardware.

I kept my old PC I bought in 2005:

Asus K8N motherboard
Athlon64 3000+ (2GHz)
Ati R9550 256 MB upgraded to Ati HD3650 512 MB (AGP)
512 MB RAM upgraded to 1 GB RAM (DDR)

80 GB WD hard disk + 400 W MSI PSU -> I think these are close to dying

It ran Windows XP originally, but I managed to install Windows 98 FE on it (I couldn't get the sound working with SE), since I used to have a Window 98 computer, but I threw it away unfortunately. I actually don't use it anymore, since I managed to get all the old games working on my new computer.

Power Mac G4 with AGP Graphics -hooked up to the VGA input of my 27" 2560x1440 display (while running at 1600x1200)- for playing pre-OSX Macintosh games.

I don't really have any retro Wintel machines beyond a few broken laptops, and a "portable" running DOS. I have some parts left from older machines, but I'm not sure I have all the parts to build a complete machine. While I have both CPU's and motherboards, I'm not sure any of the CPU's fit the boards, and I'm not certain they work in any case, then there's audio, graphics, and storage which I'm not certain I have at all.

I used to have a 486 dx 2 / 66
it had 16 megs of ram
also it had a 40 meg Hdd that I compressed and got 360 megs out of it compressed (because back then I was an insane genius now I'm just insane)

it Looked kinda like this http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/pc/h/cp425.jpg

Only retro gaming platform I own is an old PS1, which actually might be broken, but I don't really care in one way or another.

10 or so years ago I did have quite a bit of old hardware, but in the end, I didn't do anything with it, so I ended up selling it or hauling it to recycling.

I somehow manage to wreck all of the laptops I purchase (shorterst time was 2 years, just after the warranty ran out. Thanks, HP! Never again).

I do have a Compaq Presario desktop-replacement laptop from 2001 that still works, though. Well, partly. Sound card is dead (I use an external one), and screen produces a vertical line on the right side.

Don't remember any of the specs, though. Good for old games when they don't work on GOG (like Desperados before the Windows 10 patch).

Not necessarily for old games, but those I couldn't bring myself to throw away yet:

PowerMac 9500 from 1995
- upgraded from 132MHz PPC 904 to 300MHz G3
- 4 4GB SCSI drives
- 384 MB Ram, spread over 12 slots :D
- Voodoo 3 3000 with 16MB VRAM
- upgrade cards for Ethernet, USB and IDE... this thing is stuffed ;)

PowerMac G4 "Digital Audio"
- PowerPC G4 with 466MHz
- 896 MB RAM
- Radeon 9200.. this one is actually fine, supports 1920x1200 and has a DVI port...
- every IDE drive I still had lying around, from 20-160GB

Is it 1280x1024?
(because that's 5:4, not 4:3 ;-)

Ah that's the sad part, not a lot ;) Bought both of them used when they were pretty close to being outdated and just upgraded them. Actually used the G4 until 2008.