Legacy gaming box

Since I have been hearing that the newer cards look like crap running 16 bit games, I am thinking about setting up a legacy box so things like Deus Ex, Thief, System Shock and other legacy games look great, as well as setting up a dos or win95 OS to take care of issues with games that never really made the jump to the NT based systems.

The limitations I have are that I want it to be small, power efficient and have a card that is no unified shader ie. no g80 or r6xx stuff. I was also thinking about going with an AMD single core, since CPU power won't be an issue and most of this stuff will be poorly multi-threaded at best.

EDIT:

Right now, this is what I have put together.
DVD Burner - $30
APEX MicroATX slim Case w/ 275 watt power supply =$50
MSI AM2 MicroATX motherboard -$44.99
WD 500gig HDD -$100
EVGA 7600gt $84.99
Corsair 2x512 DDR2 533 -24.99
Sempron LE-1100 45Watt AM2 single core - $32.99

Total: $367.93

Possible thoughts: I could probably run it without a DVD drive at all (ie go through the network) but that would be a hassle, so I don't know if it is worth it. The 500 gig HDD is expensive, but you get a good return for your money and it gives me another storage location. Also, since I have a PC running an 8800gt anything where the 7600 wouldn't be fast enough should be new enough for the 8800 to rip it apart.

EDIT2:
What would people recommend for the OS? I was thinking of going with an nLited XP install, DOS/DOSBox (I have seen things saying that some games don't work in DOSBox, and I have access to DOS) and/or some varient of Win9x. How would linux factor into any of this?
 
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Curious but have you tried DosBox? I got Betrayal at Krondor to work without problems.
 
I had problems getting MechWarrior 2 to work. I looked around on the net, but it seemed like a lot of other people were having the same problems.

This isn't just DOSbox though. Apparently the newer architecture has problems running games designed for 16 bit rendering and causes banding and weird colors. Considering I can build this for <$400, get another PC in case my other one goes down and be able to play my old games in their full glory, I can't see why not to do it. I also get to have something running win98, which helps with some compatability issues from that gen as well.
 
Just out of curiosity, why? All of the MicroATX slim cases come with a PSU, and I seriously doubt I am going to be pushing even a 275w PSU with what I am putting in there. As far as I can tell, I am looking at a 45w cpu, 35w Video Card, maybe 30w MB, 10w HDD and not a lot else.

Most built in PSUs suck. hard. They generally have reliability issues, run hot, etc. I've gone through by 3 built in PSUs. Unless you can find detailed info and reviews about the PSU online, I would not bother.
 
Win98 might be a problem - at least all of the mATX AM2 motherboards from MSI carry a warning on their product page stating that "due to chipset limitations", W98/ME is not supported.
 
What?!? No Voodoo 2 PCI / Voodoo 5 video card? No legacy gaming box is complete without em.
 
got to agree with brit
+ why are you spending so much you can pick up a pentium 2 machine for dirt cheap nowdays
 
your hard drive might show up (or not) at 128GB. If it works ok (assuming sata would be known by the machine as scsi or raid stuff or you use a controller card), you know have hundreds of gigs on FAT32 (but you can just do it).

nice little machine, I like the low power of 65nm sempron and the G73-B1 GPU.

with that huge disk, no problem for a badass multiboot, you could have XP, 98se, FreeDOS, ubuntu.
an Audigy 1 should be a good and cheap sound card with DOS support (you won't get adlib sound from DOS though, only with DosBOX or vdmsound)
 
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got to agree with brit
+ why are you spending so much you can pick up a pentium 2 machine for dirt cheap nowdays

Very few that I have seen fit my criteria. The small ones don't have video cards, the large ones are huge and the money I save will be made up for in a year of power.

For DeusEx, why not run just it at 32Bit: http://cwdohnal.home.mindspring.com/utglr/

I really don't want to be doing that for every older game I have. I figured that I could either set up a legacy box that would run these things without a hassle, or I could spend hours for each of these things messing around with settings on a PC I actually use for other stuff.

your hard drive might show up (or not) at 128GB. If it works ok (assuming sata would be known by the machine as scsi or raid stuff or you use a controller card), you know have hundreds of gigs on FAT32 (but you can just do it).

I suppose the other option would be to buy an 80gig PATA drive off a friend for $20. I'll have to look up on it and see if there are any real problems with a large drive in win98.
nice little machine, I like the low power of 65nm sempron and the G73-B1 GPU.

with that huge disk, no problem for a badass multiboot, you could have XP, 98se, FreeDOS, ubuntu.
an Audigy 1 should be a good and cheap sound card with DOS support (you won't get adlib sound from DOS though, only with DosBOX or vdmsound)


Yeah, I liked how a lot of the options turned out. I'll look into the sound card as well.
 
Its a shame your not in the u.k
in the classifieds of a magazine i buy someones selling 4 p3-450mhz del optiplex base units for £5 each you cant complain about prices like that ;)
 
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