In fall of 2019, I built a PC to run Windows 98 games.

Why did you building a PC rather an use Virtualbox?

Many games do not work well in a VM. Notably, sound is hard to get working properly. And several games I’ve tried have graphical issues. Because these operating systems are so old, some VMs drop support for them in their guest OS driver packs. So I’m going native on real hardware.

Why call it Memphis?

Memphis was the codename of Windows 98.

Why not use Windows 95, NT 4.0, Me, or 2000?

My first PC that I played point-and-click adventure games on ran Windows 95. Not that I have anything against it, but I wanted something a little newer. Windows 98’s features and hardware support is substantially better than that of Windows 95. As for NT, Windows NT 4.0 just isn’t that good for gaming, it has limited OpenGL, DirectX, and general driver support. Windows Me is notoriously panned and lacks real-mode DOS support. And Windows 2000 is just a bit too new for what I want. So, Windows 98 Second Edition is what I chose.

What components did you choose?

Processor

At the time, I had intended to be more on the DOS side of gaming rather than the Win9x side. So I had chosen a Deschutes Pentium II 450 MHz. It was much faster than the 60 MHz Pentium I had on my first PC. Now that I’ve retargeted this build toward Win9x games, I’ve instead chosen a Tualatin Pentium III 1.4 GHz as it is the fastest model of Pentium III.

Motherboard

To go with the Pentium II, I had picked out an ASUS P2B-F motherboard. It has one of Intel’s greatest chipsets, the 440BX, with a Slot-1 connector for the processor module. It has AGP 4X for graphics, supports up to 1 GB of SDRAM, five PCI and two ISA slots for expansion. It is generally well regarded by the retro computing community as a stable, compatible board that is great for overclocking. However, with the switch to the Pentium III, I have instead purchased an ASUS TUSL2-C motherboard. It uses the newer Intel 815B chipset, which has a few limitations when compared to the 440BX, the biggest being that it supports no more than 512 MB of RAM. My original thought was to build a Pentium III system that uses RDRAM, however socket 370 boards that use RDRAM are hard to find.