It came to me in a dream - build a legacy machine

[Sabre]

I had this dream last night that me and my dads PCs suddenly turned to windows 95 (more of a nightmare am I right?) and while this was a pain for obvious reasons, I could play all my old PC games again.

This gave me 2 ideas. One wold be to build a 95/98 PC or if possable, laptop. Assuming you can get the drivers the parts would be rediculously cheap. Then I could get really nostalgic about bad old games.

The other idea was for a XP netbook/laptop of sorts. Rather then 3 grand for a crappy pc, instead something lower end that would allow me to play stuff like C&C Generals or Dawn of War. Stuff that old and older. The idea here is not to play old stuff that doesnt work any more, rather to get a cheap machine that can be used for lan and gaming on the go.

[Guest FoXXX]

Duke Nukem 3D

[DZComposer]

Garage Sales. You never know what you're going to find.

Though you may want to ask if you can boot any machine up before you buy it.

You can also run old DOS and early Windows games in a VM. DOSBox for dos games, and the free version of VMWare can probably run Win98.

I wouldn't count on 90s-era computer parts being cheap unless you specifically know a vendor that is cheap. That stuff is all special-order these days, so the economies of scale aren't there anymore.

Though if you buy enough $10 broken garage sale machines, you may be able to Frankenstein something together.

For a lower end XP laptop, you may want to hit the used computer circuit. I don't know if they have an equivalent of Goodwill in the UK, but here in the US you can get somewhat older used machines for pretty cheap there (people donate them, so Goodwill is only out refurb labor/parts). The money goes to a good cause, as well.

[Guest Julius Quasar]

Remember those ol' Nortaire 680-B's? xD