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?
BTW going to be looking to play games like Duke Nukem 3D, Need for Speed 2 SE and Command & Conquer etc.
Aside from getting the old hardware you're probably going to end up stuck on a VM
Your main issue will be drivers, and also Windows 98 does not support multi threaded cpu´s. (as far as i know).
Your best bet will probably be just go and do a dumpster dive for a pentium II or III.
Socket 478 single core pentium 4 / celeron maybe, but you will most likely allready run into driver issues with this.
I have a voodoo 2 sat in the garage. It needs a PCI slot so that's ruled out almost every PC I've owned in the past 5/6 years.
There are community compiled drivers for 3DFX cards that extend support to Windows 7 x64. Yes they work, but are tricky to configure. This would be a better bet than trying to struggle with Windows 98, even though that's where the nostalgia is.
http://www.3dfxzone.it/news/reader.php?objid=16199
Not exactly what you wanted, kind of the opposite really, but it's going to a faster payoff. I would probably use these with Windows XP or 2000 for the driver simplicity for things like USB/COM/Gameport since they'll have it all. Plus you can still get some of the nostalgia (and Glide 3X only operates on XP or lower from what I've seen, so that would be a reason to not force your poor VooDoo into running Win7.)
Currently using Glide wrapper on my main machine and it is indeed FTW, however I want a Win98 gaming machine for my Retro game room, going to use a CRT monitor and track ball mouse because why not, anyway after going through my scrap box I found a old MSI mobo and CPU from about 2001 or 2002 that has Windows 98 driver available for it, can't remember what CPU is in it, I think it's an old 1.6GHz single core so it should be grand, now all I need to decide to do is weather to use a floppy drive or add a bit of modernness (as well as convenience) and use a floppy emulation drive for those old dos games, hopefully I'll find a desktop style case cheap enough that has 2 3.5" bays so I can have both because it would a shame not to use my physical copies on this project