Both Lutris or the Heroic Games Launcher do a good job when it comes to retro gaming. The former in particular has some pretty amazing scripts for DOSBox, which is almost a must if you like games from the 1980s or early 1990s.

You may struggle to get a useful gaming experience running old Windows on such modern hardware. You’ll probably need like an actual 3dfx Voodoo card or something ISA/VESA local bus/PCI to have a chance of having the drivers. You’ll probably need some patches for it to not run it the CPU at 100% constantly and also memory capacity support.

Running under a modern emulator like others have suggested is probably your better bet.

That i3 is likely too new for 98, it probably won’t support drivers for the igpu and such. Linux will run great and should support all the older games fine.

Should put kubuntu on it and install the theme plasma-overdose

I’m really of a retrogamer and love the PC gaming area of the 90’s to 00’s. But unlike consoles or other systems, it’s a kind of a rabbit hole to get dos/win95/win98 PC titles to work today without real hardware. After years of try and retry, here are my conclusions and tips:

• MS/DOS (80s to 96 pre win95) titles: Dosbox frankly gives good results and is the easiest way to install/configure. As a second option, PCEm or 86Box are good too for titles which heavilly rely on hardware (ie too fast on dosbox or doesnt launch for any reasons). The drawback of these too emulator is the time you have to spend to configure the machines (install ms dos, mouse/cd rom drivers etc.)
• Win95/98: Wine is the first thing to try for these. Its often frustrating because it does always work out of the box. But i understood after tries and retries that issues almost come from the following issues and luckily there are good solutions for all of them:
• Resolution switching: Games from these era ask the monitor to switch to different resolution (640x480, 1024x768, even 320x200), sometimes many times for the same game between intro video, game menu and the game itsel, which are not supported anymore by our modern lcd display. If the game works in wine virtual desktop but not in fullscreen, there are good chance this is an screen resolution issue. One solution is to declare missing resolutions by adding Modeline to X server (through xrandr or in xorg.conf). One other solution is to make use of a custom build of wine with the FShack, which make use of a scaler to prevent the screen to change resolution. the new Wayland driver which is currently beeing merged is a good hope because it embed a scaler nativelly (changing resolution is no more possible in wayland).
• The game makes use obscure/old codecs for video playing: installing the 32bit version of gstreamer bad/ugly codecs almost always fix this.
• Windows version: Some old games prevented to run on WinNT versions (by reading windows version data from the registry). Using a 32bit prefix and selecting Win95/Win98 fix these issues.
• 3d drivers: glide/D3D etc. Its a bit hacky but wrappers like dgvoodoo do often miracle for title targetting 3DFX voodoo cards or old directx version by translating glide to D3D, or old directx to more recent (which is then handled by DXVK).
• CD copy protections: A lot of titles from this era rely on copy protection like safedisc, securom etc. The good news is Wine as become pretty good at handling these. One important thing is to make use of original CD or good dumps like Redump one with the cd emulator named cdemu, with the “bad-sector-emulation” option (important). Its important as well to know that some of these are only correctly supported only using winNT version (not in win98/95 etc.). The other solution which is often stated is to make use of nocd crack etc. But honestly i’m a kind of purist and don’t like these solutions and rely on them only if there is no solution (for example i had to use a crack for carmageddon 2 despite à possess the original because this title refuses to start if not in Win98/95 mode and to the copy protection is unfortunatelly not supported).

One last thing is the overwrite of wine library by native one. as a general rule i rely on this striclty only if the wine one does have issues as this option often come with its own bag of issues.

PCEm and 86box looked promising but frankly if your system is not an horsepower it lags for windows emulation (its rely good for DOS era though).

Virtualbox is not really an option as it does not handle win98 and older, and 3D support is not great.

Maybe VMware can be interresting but because its not opensource i did not tried it myself.

Hope it helps :)

I believe using only one PC is much more convenient because you can just click a button and start. Either wine or virtualization would work the best, also a 15~20 old crt monitor would make the experience much more true to what was back in the 90s early 2000s. VMware acceleration would be faster then old components from that era, and that way you don’t need swap from the main PC to the second PC and back

If you do until 98 on something do not connect it to the internet at all.

I would personally use a mix of dosbox, wine, and scumvm to play retro PC games.

That’s too new for 90s games “natively.” Windows 98 won’t be too happy on it if it runs at all.

Which Linux distro you use doesn’t matter too much, they all run the same WINE and these old games won’t be sensitive to small performance differences.

The ideal OS for these Windows games on this machine is probably Windows 7. Games will be run on a case-by-case basis as some will work fine on modern hardware/OS and some won’t. But there will often be community methods to make them work, including things like DOSBox.

The only way to get guaranteed out of the box compatibility for Windows 98 games is to run them in Windows 98 on a Windows 98-era computer. Same games just really want certain hardware.