Building a Quake PC

SLI VooDoo^2 with 12 MiB of RAM each? Young me is so jealous. But:

Windows NT can only run win32 games but does not support DOS games (especially Quake).

It does support WinQuake and GLQuake, and can use the VooDoo^2 for GLQuake! My PC of that era dual booted DOS and NT4 and ran Quake in both!

Machines like these remind me how far the technology has advanced in energy efficiency and price.

Today for ~$1 you can get a board with a CPU that runs Quake, is faster than any 486 was, and runs off USB's 500mA power, not a 200W+ PSU.

For a couple more bucks you can have way more RAM and storage than a maxed out Quake-era PC, and you can get SSDs faster than 486's RAM.

Before starting the project, the most important decision was to settle on a time period from which I would choose the parts.

I admire your purism, but my computers were never that coherent - they were rather living machines that evolve during time. So, if I wanted to rebuild something from my childhood, it would be mix of technologies from different years. However, I still have most of that hardware - it continuously mutates into „new“ machines and stock of components prepared for use. I sometimes seek completely different goal: make new and old working together.