RetroGaming

ME is a bold choice regardless—those installs always seem to destroy themselves before long in my experience (admittedly from quite a while ago now)

As for games (in no particular order):

• Command & Conquer (basically all of them up to including RA2)
• Diablo 2
• Warcraft 3
• Dungeon Keeper
• Theme Hospital
• Rollercoaster Tycoon (and RCT2)
• Unreal Tournament 99
• Fury 3/Terminal Velocity
• Z
• Age of Empires 1 & 2
• Pharaoh & Caesar 3
• MechWarrior 3
• Serious Sam
• Sim City 3000
• Quake 2 & 3
• Half Life
• Deus Ex

I'm definitely forgetting some

Rollercoaster Tycoon 1 and 2; Need for Speed 2 and 3; SimCity 3k.

Also, check your monitor properties. Afaik most CRT monitors (not TVs; those run at 60hz/50hz depending on region) are meant to run at 75~85hz. If it's running at 60hz when it's meant to run at a higher refresh rate, then that might be why it's nauseating (my crt has a very noticeable flicker at 60hz, but that goes away at 75hz).

Edit: to expand on this for any late-comers: CRTs work by using an electron gun (aka particle accelerator aka a motherfucking PARTICLE CANNON) to fire an electron beam at red, green and blue phosphors. When the electron hits a phosphor, it emits light based on the color hit. This beam sweeps over the phosphors at a speed dictated by the display's refresh rate and illuminates the phosphors one-by-one until it has illuminated the entire screen. This is why trying to take a picture or video of a CRT requires you to sync your shutter speed with the CRT. If your shutter isn't synced then the monitor will appear to be strobing or flickering (because it is, just very, very quickly)

These phosphors have a set glow duration, which varies based on the intended display refresh rate. A refresh rate that is too low will cause the phosphors to dim before the electron beam passes over them, while a refresh rate that's too high can cause ghosting, smearing, etc because the phosphors haven't had a chance to "cool off". TVs are designed to run at 60hz/50hz, depending on the region, and so their phosphors have a longer glow duration to eliminate flickering at their designated refresh rate. Computer monitors, on the other hand, were high-quality tubes and were typically geared for +75hz. The result is that if you run them at 60hz then you'll get flickering because the phosphors have a shorter glow duration than a TV.

Note: this is a place where LCD/LED panels solidly beat CRTs, because they can refresh the image without de-illuminating the panel, avoiding flicker at low refresh rates.

Edit 2: oh! Also, use game consoles with CRT TVs, not computer monitors. This is because old consoles, especially pre-3d consoles, "cheated" on sprites and took advantage of standard CRT TV resolution to blend pixels. The result is that you may actually lose detail if you play them on a CRT computer monitor or modern display. That's why a lot of older sprite-based games unironically look better if you use a real CRT TV or a decent CRT emulator video filter.

512MB RAM? Go wild cowboy. As for games:

• Arcanum
• Planescape Torment

if no one mentioned them.

How much did it cost to download all that RAM?

Looks good. I also went from win95 to winme. I got myself a p3 running win95 and got a crt too. It's definitely better on real hardware. Got yourself a ball mouse rather than laser?

Doom, doom2, red alert, Tyrian, warcraft, warcraft2, death rally, settlers 2, caesar 2, age of empires, Indiana Jones and his desktop adventures.

Oh the memories...

LucasArts Adventures

US Navy Fighters

Unreal

StarCraft

Need For Speed 1 & 2

So many favorites.

• Diablo 1 and 2
• Star craft brood war
• Red alert
• Doom, hexen, heretic, quake
• Doom 3 I think was out around then
• Dawn of war
• Guild wars
• Heroes of might and magic 3
• Counter strike 1.6, half life, half life 2

And so many more I'm sure I'm forgetting.

Carmageddon and GTA were quite some bangers, and I think they still are. Or Age of Empires 1&2.

Honorable mentions:

• Dark Project
• Soul Reaver
• Blood Omen
• King's Quest
• Ballistics
• Dethkarz
• Ken's Labyrinth
• The Settlers

Quake series are good, but 3 is mainly geared towards multiplayer. Return to castle Wolfenstein is great, uses the quake 3 engine.

Other great games that haven't been listed.. system shock 2, strife, knights and merchants, commander keen, supaplex, Dune 2000

1600 x 1200 at 60hz is actually quite respectable today. You can still buy laptops with 1366 x 768 resolution in 2024!! 🤢🤮🤢🤮

I remember having a 1440 x 900 monitor and wondering how far we would go in 10 years....10 years later 1366 x 768 was more common and I wanted to die.

Amazing project btw, you might inspire me to do something similar.

• Jazz Jackrabbit
• Descent
• Need for Speed 2
• Witchaven 2: Blood Vengeance
• Warcraft 2: Tides of Darkness

These are the games I remember best on our win95 IBM PC. My personal favorite of this era is Hexen: Beyond Heretic but that has been mentioned a few times already.

That sounds like a fun project, although I'd recommend XP over Me. XP has a DOS emulator, and it's a lot easier to configure drivers for.

My favorite games from that era are Star Wars: X-Wing and Wing Commander: Privateer. Both games stood out as exceptional back then. Warcraft was also an excellent game. Command and Conquer is worth checking out too.

Edit: I'm pretty sure I played the first two games on Windows 3.2, so I'm not sure how they'll play on Me or XP.

Edit 2: Silent Hunter is another memorable game

Unreal Tournament 99 and Everquest. But those don't even come close to needing a fraction of the hardware you procured :D

"Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory."

Stop. PLEASE! 15 year old me in the year 2000 can only get SO erect!

Don't connect that machine to the internet. (Not that you had plans to.)

Nice!

Time for some Tribes or Heroes of Might and Magic.

Keep in mind you're not going to be able to run all games between those years on a single build. Quite a few older games need older hardware, especially slower CPUs. Then, the DOS support on ME has a ton of issues that broke many games (one of the reasons people hated it), and XP is needed for a lot of the later Windows games in that range.

That said, it should work very nicely as a 9X build, which also happens to be the era with the least emulation support. If an older DOS game doesn't work, you can always use something like eXoDOS on a modern computer.

One additional cool thing you could consider down the road is something to really take your midi experience to the next level like an SC-55 MK II.

Deus Ex Duke Nukem 3d Quake

I would also recommend Windows 98se, since it was the last (popular) operating system that directly supports DOS.

Myst was my jam back then. Maybe riven, I don't remember lol. Also Diablo.

Oh the nostalgia from seeing those icons. You should join the Microsoft Network! Crack open ICQ! Get on AOL and see if "you've got mail." Heck, I may still have one of those CDs with 2500 hours on it!

i remember my dad used to have a samsung syncmaster CRT would probably preferred it over my more modern but crappier TN display

Man. That sounds like a fun build.

I consider this kinda like the wild West era of computer building. There wasn't a lot of standardization like there is now and you really have to know how to handle the software because the support wasn't really there.

See if you can play some Phantasy Star Blue Burst on that. Also gotta try the original Marathon, you can look up and down!

alone in the dark, any of the sierra games (but especially kq 5,6, and 7), lands of lore 1+2, master of orion 1+2, sam n max, sim town, myst, ultima underworld, sim ant....

It was around 2000 when I helped my parents build a computer from a shop in town. It was an AMD k6 with 512mb of ram and a voodoo3. I used that computer for years and years.

Cool idea!

I was going to mention a few games to check out but they were all already mentioned, so I will suggest the one that wasn't brought up, Star Crusader. Space combat game with a great story, fun game play, high replay value, and great voice acting for a game from 1994. And the ending blew my mind, still remember the moment and my shock to this day. I have my original CD and the jacket in a memorabilia box haha, one of only a handful of things I kept from those days.

https://www.old-games.com/download/2881/star-crusader

Get a modem and dial up too!