What would you put in your early 1990s gaming rig?

OK, it's 1995 here in FLimitsville, and I need your help. I have a 1995 Packard Bell with a Socket 5 motherboard that I want to refurbish. Right now it has a Pentium 75MHz, an unknown amount of RAM, an 850MB hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, a read-only CD drive that's slow by today's standards, and a generic sound card/CD controller. It has PCI and ISA slots, and currently it has no graphics card (it has integrated graphics with 1MB VRAM, I think). It's honestly kind of a boring machine, so I want to give it more character and turn it into a decent little DOS/Win 3.1 or DOS/Win 95 gaming PC -- the PC some guy remembers having when he was 15 back in 1995, but with a few tweaks to make it tolerable to a present-day user.

So this is where I need your help. I've done all kinds of things, but I've never been an adolescent guy and I've never been a big gamer. I have a feeling those two things might be related... Anyway, I can't draw on my own experience to choose the right hardware -- especially the sound and graphics cards -- to create that "awesome" early 1990s gaming experience. I'll max out the RAM (to a whopping 128MB :S), I'll put in a faster CD drive and faster/bigger hard drive, and maybe I'll bump up the processor to a Pentium 133. If any of you were (or still are) hard-core 1990s gamers, tell me what sound and graphics cards you would pick. I know the names and specs of a lot of them, and have even owned and used some of them, so I'm not totally clueless, but I do kind of feel like Mom trying to pick out her teenage son's gaming rig. And we all know how that kind of thing ends...

Yeah, those 80s machines are the ones where I'll use YOUR graphics card!

I think 1995 wasn't really a great time yet for video cards...1996 was when 3dfx released voodoo...close enough? You can also look into voodoo2, I think I remember people running two of them concurrently.

Soundblaster AWE32 was around in 1995 for a sound card, but I would see if you could use a Soundblaster Live! Gold (released a couple years later).


You could probably go further with these things on that system, but maybe you want to stay as early as possible.

Thanks, Ryan. I'm definitely considering the Voodoo. I think I had a Soundblaster AWE32 back in the day but wasn't awed by it. Thanks for the tip on the SB Live! Gold. Yeah, I figure it's OK not to be completely limited to products that existed as of 1995, but at the same time I don't want to go too far ahead in time. I'm still trying to decide if I should stick with a CD-ROM or if I should take the plunge and use a CD-RW, even though those weren't released until 1997.

I think I still have some of the soundblaster live cards around here somewhere. I remember using those but can't remember much about them.

Loved micro league baseball too. I still have a stack of game stats I printed out.

I had the Matrox millennium 4 or 8 meg card back then (1997-ish) it was one of the better ones at the time. It even had 3-d modeling, rendering, and creation software. I had visions of creating digital shorts with it, however it was ever so time consuming and not really ready for home user. I think I ended up with the 3dfx voodoo card after that then moved on to the diamond viper TNT in my next machine. All of them seemed to get the job done on the gaming front. The voodoo was a little tricky at times due to switching back and forth of the vid cards when 3d rendering was required vs. not.

@RyanW: SCSI-2 would be totally legit for the period. I could give it a SCSI hard drive (or 2) and CD-RW. Kind of a power-user gaming setup. Now I'm just torn between the SB AWE64, which seems more authentic, and Live!, which is just better...

@BCoop: I had the Matrox Millennium too!! I was so psyched when I got it. I was playing with 3D modeling. I can't remember what program I had -- there weren't very many for Windows at that time. Pixar's "Toy Story" came out in 1995, and 3D animation was taking off. I would have given anything for an SGI machine back then!

Well, why not just get them both and see what you think after testing them with the system? It's not like they're $150 cards anymore