Like many gamers of a certain vintage mentioning DOS, Windows 98 or Windows XP will allow us to recall our favourite games and memories from the time

I am lucky enough to own quite a nice collection of retro hardware and games that I’ve built up slowly over the years. However a gap in my continuum of classics was during the Pentium III era.

I recently came across a sensibily priced PIII based Dell on eBay and decided to pull the trigger

Unfortunately due to the age of the machine the front panel was very brittle and needed some repair. Thankfully I had some plastic glue on hand after needed to repair my Trinitron monitor base recently.

The machine came running Windows XP which I felt was a bit too ambitious and not very period authentic. So I installed Windows 98SE along with swapping out the video card for a Matrox G400

I actually bought a Matrox G400 for my work computer back in 2000 as it allowed me to use dual monitors - which was a very rare thing in those days. It features a very fast RAMDAC allowing for high refresh rates and resolutions along with industry leading image clarity for the time.

Another reason for putting together this machine was to allow me to play some of my favourite Aureal A3D games. For those who don’t know, this was a strong competitor to Creative Labs sound cards by providing the ability to simulate 3D environments in hardware on the card enabling very accurate 3D audio to be delivered.

Sadly Creative Labs crushed them not with superior technology, but just their sheer weight

Anyway, one such game I have fond memories of using this card with was Thief. So after adding the audio card, that game was also installed

Now I’ve got a period appropriate Pentium III machine to explore whilst also seeing if the Matrox G400 can hold up to it’s peers of the time (NVIDIA TNT2 & 3dfx Voodoo 3)