New update on my old junk tower: I found a purpose for it [Edit on OS choice section]

It's been a long while since I've thought about this machine. Decided to take another crack at fixing it up.

I've been itching to play some of my old childhood games again. Bejeweled 2, Zuma, Luxor, Tumble Bugs, all the good stuff. Sure, I could play them on modern hardware, but that always presents some issues.

Most of these games do NOT play nice on modern OSes, even through Steam. On Windows, most of the games will simply refuse to boot because of some missing files. While on Linux with Proton, while the games do run, 3D acceleration almost always results in the game becoming nothing more than an unplayable slideshow. Plants vs Zombies is straight up unplayable like this.

I could also do it through a virtual machine, which I have been doing for the past couple days. It's fun, it's convenient, it mostly works. One issue though: No 3D acceleration. At least not on my machine.

I never had the best machines when I was growing up, but I still remember 3D acceleration always being an option. These games just aren't the same without it.

Well, soon, that changes. I got this old junk tower I've been working on all dug out, and I'm ready to get it fully functional again.

Got good progress done on that. I figured out why it wasn't booting, hooray! Only one issue with that; It was because I broke the graphics card. Who knew just violently ripping off a heatsink glued on by decade old thermal pads and them replacing it with thermal paste, leaving nothing to cushion the chip and the metal would absolutely ruin the card? Big surprise, I know.

I'm hoping to find a good replacement at some point. Something that matches the era I'm hoping to emulate, for a preferably not bank breaking price. I just want 3D acceleration man.

I have a lot of plans for this system. New graphics card (obviously), old case, old mouse and keyboard, maybe even an old CRT. I'm really excited for this thing.