This would indeed be my daily driver for these games, simply for the commodity.
Story Time!
It started with picking out the proper parts needed to build a system that was compatible with Windows 98 with all the nice tweaks and drivers available on the internet. The obsession of my early teen years for vintage PC hardware started with the Voodoo 5 5500 graphics card, released in 2000. It was the last piece of hardware released by 3dfx before the company was sold to nVidia. The team behind the GPU went on to make the nVidia FX cards.
But with these cards hardly sold on the market, in well-kept condition, the price for a piece of history is not worth my wallet.
So I went with something else. PowerVR was a minor competitor to the big four manufacturers of the time. ATI, nVidia, 3dfx, Matrox. The chip used on the card I had purchased is in "Series3", a descendant of the graphics processor used in the Sega Dreamcast and Saturn which was "Series2". The model name is the Hercules 3DProphet 4500 PowerVR Kyro II.
So let's start from the beginning before this just ends up being an unintelligible wall of text.
I started with the processor. The best of it's kind of the time.
A Pentium4, just when Willamette was released running at 2.0ghz. This was a bit of a minor comeuppance upon purchasing which I will get to shortly, as the 1.4ghz Athlon Thunderbird was some miles faster than when Willamette was released at the time. There are many models of the same CPU, SL5TL, ZL, SL6, so on.
Then it was the chipset, and the motherboard manufacturer. Another poor choice on my end, as it was a "spur of the moment" purchase with no knowledge or manuals to go for. This would be the PCChips M925 using a VIA P4M266A.
AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is an old name. Some dinosaur computers still ran utilise this port for their graphics needs, and so would my dinosaur for the graphics card. There are many voltages and speeds. AGP 2x, 4x, 8x, with voltages of 1.5 and 3.3v. It is a wide world in of itself.
RAM was needed. The motherboard supported DDR1-266mhz RAM, a pretty simple thing to snatch up on e-bay whether in two 512GB kits or two 1GB kits for the aspiring system builder for practice. Nothing to speak of there.
Audio. No one cares about audio cards these days unless you play old games or are an audiophile. But back in the day, audio and network cards were the thing to get for the hardcore gamer of the early decade. Hell, even Fatal1ty can tell you during his Quake3 Arena days that 3D hardware accelerated audio (rather than the audio coming from your motherboard, you'd have a separate card that plugged in like a video card to process sound with it's own unique features,) was the thing to have. AudioPCI (90s), Audigy (early 00s), and X-Fi (late 00s). These were three big cards that processed audio. I had purchased an Audigy1, the base model with the FireWire port and the bells and whistles. Probably the most recent of the parts I had actually had the pleasure of getting my hands on (2002), save for something I will explain below.
Of course a motherboard of the year can easily be maxed out to it's fullest potential now that everything supported that can be plugged in, has already been made. hard drives, RAM, CPUs, GPUs. SATA cards to plug new SSDs in. These are probably the only "period unfriendly" parts I had purchased to get the system into working order. It started with what "medium" of storage I would use. A PCI to SATA card to plug an SSD in? Too cliche, Duraga already did it. As did the option I already went with, an enclosure which connects two CompactFlash cards to a single ribbon (IDE) cable to the system, in a master/slave configuration without the need of changing around jumpers or anything. So my distaste for putting modern parts in an old system was null and void, as this was essentially a rudimentary solid state drive. I had purchased the enclosure and two 32GB UDMA7 cards to go with it as well as a bracket to fit into my 3.5" drive for my case. I do not know how to explain this other purchase, but it was a PCI to gigabit LAN adapter which supports the operating system, from StarTech. The means of networking of the time have become ancient and insecure, so a new network card so I may disable my motherboard's ethernet did the trick.
So after a long night of typing this all out (questions are welcome, as always), I bring you pictures.
There is still much work to be done, however. The reason why things appear to be unplugged is due to an issue with power and CPU incompatibility. Upon powering, the fans begin to speed up, and no response from the computer (as cases and motherboards had supplied a "PC Speaker" which gave out codes in the series of beeps) as to why it would not power to video. The motherboard's chipset supplies onboard video to configure the system's drivers before plugging in add-on cards or peripherals which requires system RAM, which I have. It did not matter what I did. Change the CMOS battery, short the jumpers, unplug everything BUT power and the speaker. Nothing. So it hit me, I realised what I had just stated before, so comes ordering new parts. The current pictures are just placeholder items I had lying around before everything I had just ordered aside from the cards and board, CPU, CPU cooler, etc. The hard drive is on it's way as well as some other bits and bobs.
So this is where I leave it. A hollow shell. A sleeping lion, just waiting to begin it's tenure of raiding, dungeoneering, runecraf-- I mean Everque-- ahdamnit. Yes, I bought games with it too. Those are on the way. Why buy games for a system that doesn't even work? Well it's going to work. May as well get some games for when it does.
