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looking for a PC for 1995-1999 games!!!!!

But that would ruin the whole nostalgic feeling when playing them. :)

Whereabouts in the world are you at? We can't ship a computer to an address that never was, can we?
 
Oh, that is a rather wide range and a lot happened at that period.
1994 pentium's really took off and near the end of the century we are looking at the third iteration.

Memory ranged between 16MB and even 8 MB at the release of windows 95 but went steep up.(BTW 95 uses a different kernel for 32MB and up systems)
98 works wonders with just 64MB RAM but still more would improve performance.
Heck in you could run windows XP on a PII with only 64MB RAM it would be dog slow and dreadful to use but still fact remains you could.(I wouldn't know why you would do such a thing though)

I suppose windows 98SE is the OS your looking at?

Video cards plenty of options, Personally use a ET4000AX in my "DOS box"
 
95-99 is the hardest period to emulate, a dedicated box is a great idea. Get a PIII with ISA slots, an ISA sound card, put Windows 98SE on it and you are good to play anything from the 90s. Try a WTB on a local craigslist before you have something shipped. People still have these in their closets.
 
IMO, it's worth having the ISA slot for an ISA sound card for DOS. There were still games that worked better in DOS in 1995.

If you can, a Voodoo card is a really nice accessory for this vintage computer too.
 
If it were me I'd go the super socket 7 route. ISA, though not essentual would come in handy. Most mobos/machines of that era had at least one or two of them anyway. Folk are throwing away these machines by the truck load so shouldn't be too hard to get something suitable.
 
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PII and PIII systems can be found on Craigslist/side of the road for next to nothing and usually have everything you'd want... ISA slot for audio, PCI/AGP for video (but stay with older cards!), larger HDD support, etc.

Only issue with many of those era boards is onboard junk... weird audio chipsets, crappy onboard video, etc.

My personal favorite is a Pentium 233 MMX system. Couple 16mb 72-pin SIMMS, 8.4gb drive, ISA AWE64 and an early Radeon (7000 series) PCI video card. Runs all the old DOS games perfectly :)
 
Google the Intel SE440BX-2 Has 2 ISA slots, about 4 PCI slots and AGP. I am using one myself, running Windows 98 SE, has full USB support too including and ISA Sound Blaster card. Uses a Pentium II or III. Mine has the 450Mhz III. Can load up to 768MB of ram. Bought this PC new in '98 when it was the most blazingly fast box around!! They're really cheap too right now. That's right, you can still buy them brand new in the box! I saw one tonight on ebay including the PIII for $35 (working used)
 
To run everything smoothly you need at least an AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium III, 512MB RAM, a video card like the original NVIDIA GeForce and Windows 98SE. You can get anything more powerful than that, assuming it has Windows 98SE drivers available, since this is a must. My sisters laptop (Pentium-M Dothan 2.1, ATI mobility 9700Pro, 2GB RAM) is one of the last that had Win98 drivers and I have a spear HDD for WIN98 to use with it

At those times I personally had a socket 7 with K6-2 550 and a s3 savage 4. This was lagging big time in 1999 games and was notably slower than my friends (Intel Celeron 433, Riva TNT2 M64)
 
For this era I use a Pentium III with 768MB of ram with a Voodoo2 connected to a Matrox millennium II and a cheap software sound blaster for sound.

No joke this was my main PC up till 2008.
 
How essential is the RAM for games of this era? I have a PIII that supports 384MB (3x128) of RAM max. Are there games for 9x that won't work on XP that will have trouble with less than 512MB?

I'm thinking I'll be OK with 384. For example a major release game from 2000 that has trouble on XP is Thief II. It's recommended requirements are 64MB of RAM. 384 seems like it would be plenty for this range.
 
If you stay with Windows 98 and games until 2000 you will be fine with 384. Some later 2001-2002 games, though, that had support for both Win98 and WinXP were faster under Win98 and would make use of extra RAM. Of course these games should run fine under a modern PC and you might not even bother. I also have no experience with 384 RAM in particular, but an old time classic 2001 game, Medal of Honor Allied Assault, is notably faster at max settings with 512 than it is with 256 (and also notable faster and less buggy in Win98 than WinXP).
 
Unless youŕe running something later than Win2K, just about any system can get by with 64M or less.

Win2K or NT4.0 is probably the best match in contemporary Windows NT OS software. XP is later than 1999.
 
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