After watching some videos by Lazy Game Reviews on YouTube, I got the idea of resurrecting my family's first PC, a PII 266Mhz box made by Gateway 2000 in 1997.
Sadly, after years of neglect and moisture, the state of the hardware was simply, not so good. I had to toss out the case, power supply, video card and modem due to rust, but amazingly the motherboard, CPU cartridge and sound card look brand new. As far as I can tell the board boots up fine, I'm getting the beep code for "no VGA adapter".
So here's what I have to work with:
Intel PD440FX (I think this is the model, the manual says it should have an on-board sound chip, but the ports aren't included on this version.)
Intel Pentium II processor with MMX, running at 266Mhz
2 x 32MB sticks of Micron DRAM
Ensoniq AudioPCI 3974 sound card
The video card I had to toss out was a STB S3 ViRGE 2MB PCI.
I have a good amount of experience building my own PCs, but only in the past 7 years or so, and I have no real knowledge of audio/video cards from this time period. I'm looking to replace the video card, and probably the sound card too, with something better, but nothing quite so expensive as what Voodoo cards are currently going for on eBay.
I'm mainly looking to relive a specific time period of PC gaming, specifically the Windows95 and late DOS games from around 1993-1999. My favorites mainly things like Master of Orion II, SimCity 2000, SimCopter, Age of Empires and Civilization II.
Any thoughts/suggestions from the community?