Building a Windows 98/3DFX PC on Modern Hardware?

IrishMetalhead

Been looking to grab an old school Windows 98 gaming machine for awhile to play those classic 3DFX Voodoo games, I know you can always play them on virtual machines but as a collector I love playing on the real thing however old computers are becoming increasingly rare and I have yet to find a machine that is selling at what it's worth so I'm thinking about doing the next best thing, building one, so is it possible to build a PC with more modern hardware and successfully run Windows 98 and a 3DFX GPU? if so what would be my main obstacles around this?
Only issue I can think of would be the drivers
BTW going to be looking to play games like Need for Speed 2 SE, the orignal Tomb Raider games, Duke Nukem 3D, Command & Conquer etc.

roast

A virtual machine really would be the best option IMO. Put together a basic machine with VMware player or Virtualbox and you're sorted.

"The real thing" would be to have a machine running old hardware instead of new stuff anyway. If it's not going to be authentic that way, then a VM is the most practical way to go!

Though, to answer your question - yeah, GFX and audio drivers would be the main issues. There (possibly) could be CPU instruction set issues too, though I suppose some functions could be disabled in BIOS if the OS kicks up a stink anyway.

EDIT: Some good points here too: http://superuser.com/questions/409085/windows-98-on-a-modern-computer

And also.... what games are you looking to play that aren't on GOG.com?

IrishMetalhead

As I said I'm abit of collector and it's more about nostalgia for me, I know the hardware won't be the real deal but the Voodoo 3 GPU I plan plan on using is, I do have some early XP era motherboards and CPUs laying around so I could get away with them and I could get a old PCI audio card that supports 98 if I can't get the onboard audio working, only problem I see now would be the chipset drivers

roast

IrishMetalhead wrote: »

As I said I'm abit of collector and it's more about nostalgia for me, I know the hardware won't be the real deal but the Voodoo 3 GPU I plan plan on using is, I do have some early XP era motherboards and CPUs laying around so I could get away with them and I could get a old PCI audio card that supports 98 if I can't get the onboard audio working, only problem I see now would be the chipset drivers

Ah, didn't realize you already had the GPU.

In that case, check up on the manufacturers website for drivers chipset drivers for those motherboards anyway. I suspect some stuff might be taken care of by generic windows drivers so it might be worth building the machine to test before going getting different hardware.
As for a sound card - something like a sound blaster live should be fine, they pop up on adverts/ebay etc. from time to time. In fact, anything PCI-based before the Live should work fine too, I suspect.
IDE hard drives are a dime a dozen so you shouldn't have an issue there.

I get where you're coming from re nostalgia though.... I re-assembled a 486 machine not too long ago for the sh!ts and giggles.

IrishMetalhead

Exactly and half the fun is building and working on the machine itself, I wouldn't be doing this project if I didn't have the hard ware laying around but luckily I do, got a box full of IDE hard drives and I'm in luck with the motherboard, have a old MSI AMD socket A mobo that have 98 drivers on there website unfortunatly the onboard audio isn't support, think I have a SB Live card somewhere packed away but I wouldn't be getting my hopes up since it's been sitting in a box of other crap for years now