Hello and welcome to the forum! Being new to a lot of this as well I can definitely say that this place and the ancillary resources provided by its members are a treasure trove of information. The only downside, as you might be aware, is that the sheer amount of detailed information is overwhelming at first.

BoozerDawg wrote:

Wondering what peoples opinions were on this, as I'm looking to build a machine for Win 98 & DOS gaming. My understanding is, for real DOS gaming, your gonna need an ISA sound card, and PCI versions with DOS drivers are a bit all over the place in regards to compatibility.

You're not terribly wrong on this note. For newer machines with no ISA slots you can get away with some PCI audio card drivers, but the consensus is that quality can be pretty poor.

BoozerDawg wrote:

So I've bought an ASUS CUV4X motherboard, which has 1 ISA slot on it, and a few PCI slots with 1 AGP. Hopefully this this is good enough?

Here's what's going to happen. You're going to build a perfectly capable machine with this board as a base, then you're going to buy three or four motherboards and a mountain of cards trying to push yourself to make the most absurdly compatible machine possible. It's happened to everyone on here. But let's get this PC built first! It's a socket 370 board, so it's going to do a good job.

BoozerDawg wrote:

Next I need an ISA sound card, ISA stuff is slightly before my time so I dont really know much about the types of Sound Blaster cards that came out, is there anything I specifically need to be aware of, or should they all just work fine, more expensive ones having more features/better sound quality (but all should work fine in DOS games right?). eBay also seems to be quite expensive with these cards 🙁

That one ISA slot is a bit of a limit but I'd recommend some sort of Sound Blaster device. I think most on here would say that's where you want to start. The downside? There are a ton of Sound Blaster cards and clones, and there's even a thread regarding Sound Blaster 16 deficiencies by revision. Nerdly Pleasures has a post about various Sound Blasters as well. I would say anything Sound Blaster Pro 2.0 should be good. The most common recommendation for an all-in-one solution is an AWE64 Gold. Really, any Sound Blaster 16 could work for you if you want to get some experience with configuration and testing. Buying the cheapest working SB16 off eBay and doing all the extra research later after getting some practice would be good.

BoozerDawg wrote:

Do I also need an old CD drive with DOS drivers if I want to run things off CD from DOS too? My current DVD drive is IDE but I think one of the last bunch that were made, so I dont have any hope for a specific DOS driver for it (unless somebody made a generic driver out there)?

Check out Phil's video on getting DOS mode configured in 98SE. It's super easy and I have it working great with my MMX multi-purpose machine.

BoozerDawg wrote:

Sorry for all the questions, dabbing into a bit of pre-my era (I started on Win 98 SE) gaming so certain things i'm not sure of 😀

No problem. My first "real" PC was running Windows ME and my friends down the street were running 98SE. We spent days playing DOS game with no sound since we had no idea how to configure anything 😜

Thanks for the reply, some golden information in there, really appreciate it 😀

You are right though, this bug is starting to make me spend a little too much on old hardware, need to restrict myself :p

There are many ways to go about it - the short one, and a whole plethora of long ways.

Short way:

1. Get an AWE64 Value CT4380/CT4500/CT4520 or an SB32 CT3670 ISA card; an IDE optical drive (doesn't matter which); PS/2 mouse/keyboard; and one of the popular video cards from late 90s / early 2000s (Voodoo 3 / Riva TNT / GeForce 256)
2. Configure Windows 98 SE to boot into pure DOS (BootGUI=0 in MSDOS.SYS)
3. Don't bother with Phil's very long and detailed guides; just write a minimal set of startup files, similar to the ones I provided here. You will need to make sure you have the CDROM/mouse drivers referenced there, but these are pretty standard and easy to come by.
4. For Windows, you may also want a networking adapter
5. Enjoy!

Long way:

75 different ideas will be brought up by different forum members in this thread shortly.

ISA Sound Blaster will definitely give you the best compatibility. You don't even need a 64, 32 or 16. Most DOS games will use Pro2 capabilities at most, with late games that utilize 16-bit mixing being the exception. (Though a 16 will be the bare minimum if you want MPU-401.)

CD drivers are simple enough that there are a few you can use. [OAKCDROM.SYS or UIDE.SYS] + [SHSUCDX or MSCDEX] has supported every late drive I've ever used.

If you're looking to game on the cheap, a GeForce 2MX is a solid option that looks great and operates very fast in DOS, combine it with a cheap Voodoo 1/2 (good luck!) for full coverage. You can generally get your hands on a GeForce 2 MX for under 10 bucks if you're patient. Alternatively, a Voodoo 3/4/5/Banshee will cover all your bases, but these are often not had for cheap either. S3 can still produce slightly faster benchmarks for strictly 2D, but only if you get your hands on a Savage4 Extreme or Trio64v2/DX. Since you plan on a 98 machine, stick with the former suggestions when you can. You won't regret it.

If you can get your hands on a Geforce 3 Ti, though, that might buy you DVI and DX 8.1 support, and stuff like this can even tear through early 2000s games.