A complete retro gaming rig guide | Part 1: Choosing the Era

so, one day you decided to build yourself a retro gaming/entertainment rig. if you are not experienced in PC building at all, you might not know where to start at all. if you do, going into the past might have own caveats as well. this is why i am starting a series of guides that will help you in your path to y2k lifestyle. this one will be focused on choosing the era, and building your retro gaming rig.

so, let's begin!

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Part 1: Choosing the Era

this is a much more important step than many realize. before you build and use your rig, you must think what time frame specifically you want it be era-appropriate for. a lot of further choices will depend on it.

generally speaking, there are 4 eras we are usually interested in when building an oldschool/retro rig that can be sorta daily-driven to some extent:

• late 90s
• early 2000s
• mid-late 2000s
• early 2010s

anything later is already considered modern. anything earlier is mostly considered vintage, and is definitely a different kind of commitment. so we will focus on everything from late 90s to early 2010s.

to tell the eras apart, we need to understand what defines them. mainly it's what we can do on it and what we can play on it. so mostly core definition is power and OS support. we will start with OS, as deciding what OS we will run will also affect our hardware choices. 

generally, per era, optimal choces are as follows (i will only list Windows family here, for practical reasons):

• late 90s: Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98 SE, Windows Millenium Edition (ME), Windows 2000 SP4
• early 2000s: Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP Professional SP3
  
• late 2000s: Windows XP Professional SP3, Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 x32/x64 (depending on hardware)
• early 2010s: Windows Vista Utimate SP2 x64, Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64
• not recommended: Windows 95 or below, Windows 8.x or above
  

for some enthusiast rigs, like ABIT BP-6 based rigs with dual Celerons, NT 4.0 is the best era-appropriate choice. otherwise, Windows 2000 is a safe bet. 

for later rigs, Windows XP Media Center Edition might be a fitting choice. avoid Home or any specialized XP editions like Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs or Embedded POSReady 2009. Windows XP x64 Edition is strongly advised against due to poor driver and general software support.

Windows Vista and 7 edition lineup is a mess, and I generally recommend going with Ultimate. other editions have no inherent benefits.

DO NOT ignore Service Packs. grab the ISO that has the latest available Service Pack integrated. in case of Windows 98, use the official copy Second Edition. community SE packs are strongly advised against, as they are known to cause problems. for getting further updates if needed, including POSReady 2009 updates for XP Pro/MCE, use the Legacy Update tool.

i recommend you to be open minded. DO NOT avoid Vista or Millennium Edition solely for their public image. they might fit your rig better than 7 or 98 depending on config. for example, on Core 2 Duo machines with 2GB of RAM, Windows 7's agressive SuperFetch caching might be a detrement, and Vista would boot and overall run faster. more on that in Part 2: Picking Hardware

Windows 95, while iconic, generally unstable and has poor driver support - this is pretty much a museum piece. Windows 8/8.1 went in a bin together with Windows 7 in 2020s, so using them has no benefit - in contrary, you will get an OS that feels out of place for most setups. while Windows Embedded 8.1 is a good choice to make an old machine daily drivable at all costs, but this is legacy hardware survival, and is out of scope for this guide.

as to actually deciding the era, here how it goes: Windows XP and up eras have the best daily driver usability with community still attempting to keep those afloat. Windows 9x would be almost strictly about gaming, and mostly local gaming. visiting any sites, even spacehey or napo, can be problematic.

as to game selection, i advise just looking what notable games came out in a chosen time period. from here its about hardware selection, and this will be discussed in part 2.

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for now, that's it! comment if you have any corrections or suggestions, and whether you are interested in part two =D