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?
Did you play Squadrons? The mission briefings were still not up to X-Wing/Tie Fighter standards but the flight was 10/10.
I seem to remember having issues with XP and Dos games but if ME is too problematic I will try 98 and XP. Though if I'm going with XP I'll be using a half built P4 PC that I have hanging around.
I never did play Squadrons. I joined the Army right after the X-Wing era and had a several year gap where I didn't touch a computer at all.
Now that I think about it, if these are straight-up DOS games then you don't need Windows at all. You can just load MS-DOS and then run the game straight from the command line. I think you're right that XP broke a bunch of old DOS games. It's been so long that I completely forgot we were mad at Microsoft for the removal of DOS back then and the move to an emulator only experience.
I was so, so hyped for Squadrons, even had a HOTAS setup on my list...then the game came out.
Everything I heard, even from people who loved it, totally turned my view of it sour, and I was so glad I didn't sink any money into it.
Maybe someday we'll get a SW fighter sim that delivers.