One of the more surprising aspects of old PC software from the DOS era is that if you ask people who specialize in it what kind of PC you should build to play it the answer you'd be most likely to get is simply this:
Don't.
The conventional wisdom, if you want to run old software, is "Use DOSBox". While this isn't 100% compatible with everything, it's a very good emulation tool for DOS games. Generally for more intense usage requirements, the conventional wisdom is otherwise a DOSBox fork like DOSBox-X (which can even run Windows 95 or 98!) or PCem (which is meant to more closely replicate specific period-correct hardware configurations from motherboard to graphics accelerators and sound cards, but uses some of the same backends that the DOSBox variants do).
This might be surprising to people who weren't around at the time, especially given that the sort of people who talk about retro computers obviously have their bread-and-butter be the result of experimenting with, explaining, and showing off old hardware. But I think some of you might have a good idea of why; I suspect this site's usership is fairly high on people who understand what "commodity fetishism" is, and a lot of the ways people talk about old computers is like that. I am all in favor of people continuing to find ways to make use of old hardware, and treat history as more than a large pile of silicon waste, but ultimately there is a reason that technology progressed on. Seeking an "authentic" experience with old hardware has to come with the fact that different developers had very different ideas of how to use hardware, many of which were in contention with the hardware of the era and how it eventually developed. There is value in reference hardware for helping us to understand how best to experience old software (so we don't produce buggy software to replicate these experiences) but in general the future has brought us the experiences of the past with more flexibility, more convenience, and, often, just better quality in general.
I want to go in detail to these issues, and in this post I'm going to lay out a lot of what my retro gaming PC frustrations are. In future posts, I'll go into more depth about them and what sort of options, if any, we have to ameliorate the conflicts of past computers.

loooool