I'm looking to play some mid to late 90s PC games. I'm

>>3967047

The OS matters way more than the hardware.

>>3967051
My modern PC is Win10. If I go with old hardware I figure I'd stick with 98 or XP depending on hardware.

I can't really use VirtualBox, VMware, etc with my modern machine. Too many incompatibilities with my set up.

If you have some spare time on your hands you can use Linux with GPU passthrough. Windows XP should work fine, windows 98 in theory should work but I haven't tried it. Just need to make sure you have a GPU with the correct drivers

Most all late 90s games have software renders available.
I do a lot of my vintage Windows gaming just in a WinXP virtual machine on VMWare Player.
And most anything too new to work in that is new enough to work fine on my Windows 7 desktop. There are very few exceptions.

Keep it simple

>>3967053
You can try dual booting. Set up a smaller partition, read up articles online. It should be pretty easy with Windows.

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>>3967047
>an early 2000s Pentium 4 or Athlon build?
That's what you want as long as it's not so new there aren't 98 drivers. Probably make sure there are DOS drivers for your sound card too