Let's begin with a breakdown of something that needs to be said: I've never had the chance, ever, to fully experience any old tech around the 80's and 90's in the way it was meant to be. Because the time when I lived through my childhood was simply too new for such a thing to even coexist, I've never touched any tech older than, say, the 2000s, until I stumbled upon virtual machines. The oldest operating system I've ever used with proper, period-correct equipment was Windows XP; the place where I lived had either Windows 7 or XP, and they coexisted for years, with no 8, 8.1, or even 10 in sight. This was true even years after Microsoft officially ended support for general-purpose editions of XP, and I remember the very fond memories of using the OS on a supported machine like it was all normal. But even so, the days of DOS gaming, as well as the general 9x kernel, were not part of my childhood in any way aside from me being mesmerized by it and installing the OS on a bunch of virtual machines.
Today, I'm a student who is nearing the college years of my life now, and I'm also a tech enthusiast who's ironically interested in lots of old tech and software, despite being someone of this age. When I first discovered all the older versions of Windows, down to the 9x and the early 3.x, 2.x, and 1.x days, and its rather big difference to my then-main Windows 7 laptop, at least in terms of how it looked and how it performed certain tasks, I was really mesmerized by what was made in the past. It did not seem real to me that this was what Windows looked like back then, but it also dawned on me just how the modernization of the internet looked like today compared to then, and it also made me realize how hardware back then differed so much from today in many specific ways, like IDE/SATA-related issues, CPU speed limitations, RAM limitations, DMA/IRQ assignments, and more. The operating system that remained in my mind the most, though, was Windows 98, and from time to time I'd see this operating system being showcased all over the place, arguably even more than Windows 95 did. And today, lots of retrocomputing enthusiasts tend to run this OS for a hybrid of DOS gaming and PC gaming from the 90s to the early 2000s, but they also tend to relive the past by completing one task I always thought was difficult: Building a period-correct PC.
Since then, the biggest quest that I've been thinking about for years on end was to build some kind of PC that would be capable of running an operating system from the 1990s. More specifically, I wanted to run Windows 98 on real hardware, bringing out equipment from that time period in question to live through something I wasn't even able to experience because I didn't even exist back then. Going through a hardware from a time period unknown to me. Experiencing something all new, in any way possible. That was the goal.
I ought to explain my basic plan back in the day when I started working on this project - It started taking fruition when I was talking to a Polish friend (SpartaRemixerPL) about my plans of building such a thing back in the summer of 2022, and how it would go about if I tried. He initially suggested me to build something around the time period of Athlon 64's, if I remember correctly, being part of the plethera of hardware officially supporting Windows 98.
Now, a keen eye among you may not like this set of configuration for a Windows 98 PC. And really, I'm aware of the issues that could arise from using such a rig; some of these examples are excessively fast CPU speeds for DOS (Even with cache disabled), GPU bottlenecking, and worst of all: DMA-related issues and PCI soundcard incompatibilities. But I'd be getting ahead of myself explaining why as of now, as we're just about to get started. So, let's go back on track.
Okay, it's to be continued for now, but I'll be back soon. :)