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?
Yeah seriously that's an ungodly amount of RAM for a PC of this vintage. My old WinMe machine had 128MB.
(And an 800Mhz PIII. I later added a GeForce 4 MX 4000 so I could actually play games at more than 15-20 FPS. It was my first graphics card purchase ever. Also upgraded to XP cause Me would BSoD so often that I never got a chance to do a proper shutdown at the end of the day. When the machine crashed, I was done for the day.)
I remember going from 128 -> 192 MB in order to upgrade from ME to XP so I could learn programming with Visual C# 1.0. It was completely doable, assuming you manually disabled almost all the background services.