The reality is not all emulation is perfect, it's called an EMULATOR and not a "Software Reproduction". IBM PC Compatibles were made by many manufacturers, using parts from many manufacters, put together by all sorts of people of varying skill levels from "just barely knows how to turn the thing on" to "Steve Wozniak" level. So emulating that exact 386SX you had in 1992 or that IBM PC XT you had in 1983 is not 100% possible. There will always be outliers and pieces of software that need something so exact it won't run withoutt being modified in somway, but there will also be the 85% or more of software that WILL run in something like DOSBox without an issue, most people fall into this category.

And you don't necessarily need to run DOSbox. Maybe you're partial to a particular genre/maker, ie, you like LucasArts and Sierra graphical adventures. Well, you don't need DOSbox, you can copy the games to your modern PC, and run them with SCUMMVM, a emulation engine that runs games that run on the SCUMM/AGI/SCI/Hugo's House of Horror's engine. Or maybe you want to play Ultima VII Parts 1 & 2 and not need to go through the ridiculous amount of resource file modification in DOS to get those to work with their janky "VooDoo" memory managers - there's Exult, or even on retro-hardware there's U7dpmi. Maybe you want to run a large scale network of vintage machines to reproduce a circa 1993 Novell Business nework - you can do that too using a Virtual Machine such as Oracle VirtualBOX. That's another viable option. While hardware is more fun, and more accurate, and easier in some ways (but harder in others), maybe emulation is right for you. I'm not the guy to make that decision, that is yours on your own.

The positive side of emulation is you don't end up dedicating space in your house for old hardware. You don't need to manage and maintain the old hardware either, or find out new ways to do old things, like find new ways of attaching mass storage to run your games from in the form of IDE ot SATA adapters and IDE to CF-CARD converters. If the Emulator fails, you just download a new copy and install it, or fix a plaintext configuration file at worst - instead of having to dedicate a space in your house to ripping apart PC's to find out what's broken. It's also a bit less stressful when you need to carry-out a rebuild on an emulator versus having to break out the tools and get busy working on some old machine.

The trade-off though is the experience is not 100%. You're still looking at "jaggy" pixelated, low resolution artwork on a HD monitor that's letterboxed, even if it has filters to similate the raster-lines. It's still not staring at a 14" beige, low-dot-pitch, CRT, sitting atop a large beige box with 2 HDD's with that disting bootup sound - "click" "Whirrrrrrrrr" "beep" "whirrrrrrrrr" "donka-donka" "donka-donka" "whirrrrrrrrr" "Beep" "Starting MS-DOS..." - and you don't get to experience a clicky, beige, mechanical keyboard with a 2 button mouse and the dusty yet high-tech smell of vintage silicon going about it's business in it's pokey MHz clockspeeds. But you won't have so much bizzare tweakery or multiple config profiles to run multiple games on t he same vintage hardware in some cases. For some people, that's okay.

• Retro-Gamer - the most common kind of retro-computing user around. This is someone from any age group (typically) who wants to play older games, either out of nostalgia, or to learn about what came before what we have now. These types of users typically will start with emulation and then decide to invest in some vintage hardware, usually starting somewhere around the 486-Pentium II era most of the time, expanding outward into newer/older platforms as they want/need. DOS and early Windows had a lot of classic games on it such as Ultima, Monkey Island, Leisure Suit Larry, Doom, Duke Nukem, Commander Keen, and Wolfenstein - but there's also over thousands of software titles, many free/abandonware, to explore, and a lot of them very obscure, weird, or interesting. It can be a lot like being into foreign films and learning the cultures of different gamers around the world, whether it's playing Boovie from Russia or Saint Nicholas (Sinterklaus) from Holland. There's always something to learn or discover and get your own feel for.
• Business Use Case - the most unknown kind of retro-computing is the business use-case. Back in the 80's 90's, companies would sometimes invest thousands to millions of dollaras into custom coded software mamde by independant developers, sometimes very specialized, and intended to run on old hardware that would function properly in sometimes very specific thermal and atmospheric conditions. This can range from a 486 chugging away at gerber files for a CNC machine in a factory that is about 95 degrees all year round with metal particles flying everywhere, to a 286 powered machine on the Hubble telescope in outer space. "Embedded applications" is a very popular place for hardware tinkerers and Envelope Pushers below to find hardware to experiment with, as some of these p latforms are still "Alive" in the business world. They still make 486 class single board computers for example, to drive things like CNC Machines, Injenction Molding machines, and Traffic Lights, as it would cost more money in downtime or re-development to "upgrade" than it would to continue running the same software on the same class of hardware that has worked for a long time.
• Hardware Tinkerer Another highly unspoken group are hardware tinkerers. I'm a major one in this group (obviously). What we like to do is not just use our vintage hardware for running software, but we enjoy tinkering with the machines themselves, seeing what different hardware is like, how well it performs, and what advantages/disadvantages it might give. Some hardware tinkerers are budding electronics enthusiasts who want to work on something different than an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi - which often already has a lot of the projects and user path pre-cut for you to make it "easy" - whereas an old PC is kind of like homsteading in the desert, what works for one guy might not work for another.
• Retro-Developers There are people who prefer to develop FOR vintage platforms ON vintage platforms. A fine example of this would be Dave Murray, aka the 8-bit Guy, who has developed several modern games such as Petscii Robots for the eCommodore PET, on the Commodore PET, or the Planet X3 series. There's also DMA Software whoh released Retro City Rampage DX for both modern systems, and ported it to the 386+387 and 486 based computers, or the developer challenge that birthed Post Apocalyptic Petra, or whatver cheeky I presume Scottsman that developed the toilet-humor game for DOS "P". Also there's tons of people making new DOOM and Quake maps, and game mods for old titles. Even people like me who dabble in old engines like Adventure Game Studio, RST Game Maker, or even BASIC or OHRRPGCE - to develpp new games for DOS. Yes, even in 2022, there's new software still being made for DOS. You won't find it on any place like Steam or GOG a lot of the time, but you'll find them selling indie boxed titles and downloads from their website. The PC from the 2000's on back was very "rock n' roll" in this way - lots of us "paying our dues" creating software before getting somewhere with something big. A bit like starting a Punk or Grunge band to be honest.
• Envelope Pusher Actually a subset of hardware tinkerer, and onen I belong to as well. We are mostly intereested in seeing how far we can push the old hardware to run. This can go from just a guy wanting to build the best circa 1992 486 DX2-66 system he can - a system thatwould have cost around $15,000 back then, or people like myself who want to weed out all the "bottlenecks" in the form of appending "modern-ish" hardware to vintage hardware. For example, my main 486 box, Creeping Net 486, at it's barebones is a fairly typical DX4 system from 1995, but once we move into things like networking and Data Storagge, where I'm playing with hardwaer like SATA drives and mSATA SSDs in 44-pin IDE converters, or messing around with WiFi Serial Modems capable of WPA2-PSK on a modern WiFi Network, or TLS 1.2 enabled MS-DOS web browser, Links, then you're going into a new subsector where we are wanting the "vintage" vibe and feel, but without the inconveniences of old IDE bottlenecks, unreliable 30+ year old hard drives, cantankerous CD-ROM interfaces that only go 4x speed at best when we can use a 48x DVD-RW drive, video cards limited to 1MB of VRAM, and memory in capacities that limit the performance of the machine from being it's best. This is not a common subsect as it's one you neeed to work your way up to and requires at least an intermediate understanding of how PC Hardware, modern and legacy, actually work - and how theey can work together. As well as how the hardware evolved to these technologies - so it's like a working history lesson as well as seeing how dissimilar (or even similar) today's tech is versus what existed 10-20-30-40 years ago.
• Distrustful End-User And lastly, the elephant in the room, the "distrustful" end user. Some of us do treat our vintage hardware as a form of "Bug Out Computer" of sorts. IE, a non DRM protected, part-time connected, corporation un-manageble device that our data stored on it is strictly OURS, and that we own outright tangibly. This kind of shows how computing has "advanced" in the last 30 years. It used to be, you owned a licence to install a piece of software you bought because you had the box and serial key for it, all the data you created ono your computer was at thee mercy of the hard drive and floppy disks, not some faceless company with a "cloud" upon which you store it, and the lack of security mixed with common sense, prevented a lot of the current day cybercrimes like identity theft and ransomware, from being a thing - as well as the fact there is no full-time internet connection (unless you want one), and even ifyou do want one, you most likely are not storing or doing anything of any actual value on the machine, so the risk is mitigated by the fact the hardware is old, the software is old, and anyone using it is not going to be doing financial transactions (because they CAN'T) nor downloading much (it takes a really long time sometimes for things that take 10 minutes on a modern machine). But it's nice to have a peace of mind that you have a spreadsheet, word processor, entertainment, and digital data storage that is immune should the internet become such a cesspool that nobody is safe from it. Old computer's offer protection from that mixed with the rare trait of "Common Sense" known today.

• Period/Collectors Piece - A Period Piece build is a vintage PC as it would have been in it's respective time period. An example would be - an IBM PC 5150 from 1981 with 64K RAM, dual 160K Single Sided floppy drives, a 5151 Monochrome display with Monochrome TEXT ONLY video card, and the O/S and software from the time period on matching format to the floppy drives. This would be like a computer yyou would see in a museum display.
• Mainstream RetroGamer - Mainstream RetroGamer rigs would be similar to what a lot of YouTubers use. The majority of thtime it's a 486 or an early Pentium machine, usually with a CF Adapter installed, a reasonable - but not insane - amount tof memory, and some of-the-period aesthetic hardware to make it look the part, even if that hardware may be newer and better performing in nature. Fine examples of this would be LGR's woodgrain 486 or my Moondog Commputers 486 tower.
• Hybrid Rigs - Hybrid Rigs or "Retro-Modern" are basically what I do. YOu take a barebones vintage PC and then deck it out with maximum RAM, maximum HDD Space, max out the VRAM if possible, throw in asuper-obnoxiously high powered sound card. An example of this would be Creeping Net 486 which has a 2MB VLB VESA Video card in it, SoundBlaster AWE64 Value, PnP Ethernet, Super I/O controller with a fast dual IDE controller set to the fastest xfer rate with a ATA-133, SATA, or mSATA drive (including SSD) attached. The point of these is to weed out all the bottlenecks and inconveniences of a vintage computer, while retaining the stuff that makes it "special" and give it that "vibe" that makes it cool - still being itself, just without wait times or unreliable old data storage.
• Rat Rod - This is a class of machines, usually dumpster diver specials, or machines that look like hell and were bargained to death to a surprisingly cheap price on e-bay. Not retro-brited, and cobbled together out of whatever you could find or afford. This is a place a lot of people start out, and despite the beat up lookcs, cracked bezels, battery acid etched motherboards and cantankerous hardware, they have a character all their own that is unique. An exmaple would be a 286 barebones someone buys off e-bay, slaps in an 8 GB HDD they found at the local thrift, throws in a VGA card from Uncle Dan's closet of old random crap, and FreeDOS installed via a USB to IDE Adapter using a boot disk.

Class/Desc.	Years	What they were Used For	Pictures
PC/XT Class (8088/8086) The PC/XT Class machines were the earliest IBM Compatible x86 MicroComputers released. While considered starting in 1981, they actually started in 1983 with the Compaq Portable, and "offiially" carried on until 1987, though some examples were made as late as 1993 as budget "Turbo XT" Builds using low-end chinese parts. Many of these devices continued to see active use until well after the dawn of the mainstream internet/world wide web. Desktops were usually lay-flat "desktop" type machines where the monitor sits on on top, while portables were typically Sewing Machine Style cases called "luggables".	1983-1987 or 1981-1993	Typically PC/XT class computers were status symbols and business tools of the rich, and large organizations that handle government, banking, and occasionally Science (though most serious Science centers would op for a a IBM System/360 Mainframe and a bunch of "dummy terminals" probably). Mostly they were used for writing text documents, spreadsheets, dialing up Bulletin Board systems (BBS), and playing old text adventure games, and 4-color CGA DOS Games, many of which were not DOS based but booted directly off of a floppy diskette placed in the A:\ drive prior to powering the machine on - "Booters" as they were called. Popular games included Sopwith, Ultima III, Ultima IV, Leisure Suit Larry, King's Quest I-III, Space Quest I & II, Maniac Mansion, Digger, Pac-Man, and various other arcade ports and recreations made by small independant publishers.
PC AT Class aka. 286 The "AT" Class is named after the IBM Personal Computer AT/5170 released in 1984, a 286 based behemoth of a desktop aimed mostly at the business market and intended to leverage the 286 CPU's power using Linux. Of course, not long after, Compaq, Dell, Gateway 2000, Packard Bell, Zenith Data Systems, NEC, and all the others started to make their own "Clones" of this particular format of machine.	1984-1990 or 1984-1993	The use case for a 286 is typically not that much different from a PC/XT class machine, except it's a little more capable than an 8086/8088/80186/80188 based PC is. Not a whole lot of people bought these, and those who did basically used them as a "fast XT". The 286 era was a weird one too as it kind of moves from PC's being a office tool for the basic office lackey, and a status symbol of the "educated" rich, into the early DOS era where 2nd hand PC's started to kind-of become a thing for the first time. 286's managed to live up until 1993 as clone boards can be found this late - basically making it the low-end of the rigs used for the "golden era of DOS gaming (1987-1993). Most of the time 286's were used similarly to Xt's, spreadsheets, word processing, maybe the occasional fancy EGA bar graph, pie chart, or presentation (Harvard Graphics), or the graphics mde for in something like Z-Soft Paintbrush or Microsoft Paint. As for gaming, popular games used on these would be: Ultima IV and VI, Monkey Island 1 & 2(ish), Commander Keen, and a lot of shareware and shovelware stuff.
386 Class The intel 386 class computer marked a change in the segement. In 1986, Compaq released the first one to market - the Deskpro 386. And IBM then followed suit in 1987 with their Personall System/2 series of computers, mainley the high end models with the new (and infamous) MicroChannel (MCA) expansions slots. Dell, Gateway 2000, and many others also realeased 386s of their own, but this was really when the generic "Whitebox" clone PC was taking off, these were usually the plain towers and desktops you saw that all had varying names but shared the same Steelcase, Songcheer, and Kingspao cases with each other.	1986-1995	The 386 started off mainley as that one $10,000 computer in the office that would be used to process large spreadsheets and databases, but by the end of the 80's, would become a mainstream staple in computer-needy upper class and upper-middle-class homes, and eventually relegated to the "i'm giving this to my kid to play with" computer by the mid-late 1990's. These were the poster-children of the "Golden Age of DOS Gaming" - as they ran ALL of the populalr games and software of the 1986-1992 period really really well. This includes: Maniac Mansion, Leisure Suit Larry I-V, King's Quest Series, Space Quest Series, Police Quest series, Ultima V, VI, and VII parts 1 & 2, Monkey Island 1 & 2, Sam and Max, Lost Vikings, SIm City, Sim city 2000, Sim Earth, Sim Ant, Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem Episodes, Jill of the Jungle, Elvira, and a heaping ton of the endless sea of VGA compatible, 386+ DOS titles of the era.
486 Class The intel 486 class was really the PC's "Adolescence/Teenagerhood". At the start of the era, the 486 was seen much like the 386 4-5 years before, as an expensive machine meant for "real work" that needed a lot of "horsepower". The 486 era introduced us to a LOT of things that are pretty normal now: high-speed-direct-to-CPU bus slots for video and other high speed functions, user-upgradble CPUs, memory past 8MB on the regular, Windows, the internet, optical media, SVGA Graphics, and digital audio on a PC. Everything today's PC is taken for granted for - it owes to the Intel 486 era.	1989-1997 or 1989-2007	The 486 era saw the start of the IBM Compatible PC as a "mainstream" platform. At first it was again the "$10,000 computer in the office for "REAL" work" but by 1991-1992, the 486 was coming into it's own as a powerful desktop workstation for everyone from the basic office admin all the way to the CAD powerhouse architecht with digitizer pad beating on that internal 487 floating point unit like a red-headed stepchild. They were among the first computers to surf the world wide web, among the first to play 3D First Person shooter games, and among the first in general to seem anything remotely similar to a "modern" PC....but....they were also the LAST to be downclocked to run older, unthrottled software, the last to have key-security on the case, the last to be stuck under a 528MB HDD size limit, the last to have the majority of their games run on pure DOS vs. Microsoft Windows 9x, and among the last of these machines to be seen as a "Precision Instrument" and not a "Consumer Product". The 486 of 1995 looked almost nothing like the beige, boxy, basic, SVGA, sound-less 486 of 1989. As such the 486 laid host to many of the most respected software and gaming titles above, as well as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Mortal Kombat, NASCAR, Abuse, The 7th Guest, Alone in the Dark, Pursuit of Greed, Descent I & II, heck, a 486 will even run Diablo or Postal. Suprisingly, the 486 was such an "x86 Hero" of sorts, it managed to find a new life beyond consumer computers post 1997, as a popular Embedded platform running in factories and medical equipment worldwide - leading the PGA 168 processor chip to continue production by intel until 2007 - that's right, 2 years shy of it's 20th birthday. Simultaniously Microsoft dropped support of Windows 3.1x at the same time - as many 486 embedded systems were still running that GUI on top of DOS. It makes the 486 era one of the most popular and fascinating eras of retro-computing on the IBM Compatible x86 platform.
Pentium (586) Class The intel Pentium started in 1993, but did not catch on until 1995. Initially it was offered in a buggy, thermally horrible, 60 and 66MHz part, that had a serious flaw in the Floating Point Unit (math Co-Processor) inside the chip. Intel spent the next 2 years perfecting it, eventually releasing the popular Socket 5 parts known as the Pentium 75, Pentium 90, Pentium 100, and Pentium 133. Later a 166 and 200 MHz part were released, as well as a 133, 166, 200, and 233MHz parts with MMX Technology being released sometime in 1996 or 1997. The Pentium name came from the fact that Intel could not use a number as a Trademark, so they chose the term "Pentium" - using the latin terms for "five" (Penti) and an abstract noun of "element" (ium) - hence "Pentium". By this point, beige was being replaced by off-white on desktops, and gray on laptops (mostly) such as the NEC Versa, Toshiba Sattelite, and some later compaq models. Laptops started getting wider, flatter, and with bigger screens beyond 10" in size (previously 9.4" was the most popular screen size). The Computer had finally come of age as a mainstream consumer product, as throughout the Pentium's lifetime, PC's went from the old "whitebox" clones of the 80's and early 90's, to standardized "Consumer" offerings like the Compaq Presario, Dell Latitude, IBM Aptiva, and HP Pavilion model in the home, ,and "Enterprise" models ke the Compaq SystemPro, Dell Precision, IBM NetVista and PC-3xx models, and the HP Z-series in the workplace.	1995-2002	The Pentium, with it's final takeover of the mainstream in 1995 with the help of Microsoft' highly popular and influential O/S - Windows 95 - and the advent of hte Internet going beyond a stand up comedian joke nobody understood to an actual thing people were doing - it was the beginning ofthe consumer PC. This was when DOS gaming started to fall by the wayside to 3D, and Direct X driven computer games running under Windows 9x, which would set the stage for later on. Once you get past a certain point in this era, they become less suitable for anything older than a 386 because the speed is just too fast for any older DOS titles, with most of them being either unplayably fast, or crashing with a "divide by zero" error at the command line because the processing is just too quick.
Pentium Pro/II/III/4 (686) Class The 686 class starts in 1996 with the intel Pentium Pro, which came in 166, 200, and 233MHz clock speed, and is a rare CPU used in servers (I used to have one I used as my backup computter to the GEM PIII back in 2004). The Pentium Pro was then updated, and created for the consumer market as the Pentium II in 1997, carrying on into an improved version called the Pentium III in 1999. In 2001, the Pentium 4 came about, and represented a large change in archetecture, which would be maybe the last time we would have a tremendous, industry-wide, sweeping presumption of what a "modern" PC is on such a wide scale. These machines were instrumental in the mainstream-ization of PC's.	1996-2013	The Pentium Pro was mostly just used in high end servers and ultra-high-end workstations. When the Pentium II was released, by then the world of Windows 9x and later Windows NT based software and gaming had already been cemented by the original Pentium and Windows 95. As we move into the Pentium III era, DOS starts to fade by the wayside massively as "obsolete", until in the mainstream consciousness, it was "dead". This was the rise of the "modern" PC, and the final nail in the coffin, Add to it that Windows Me failed, Windows 2000 Professional was a great O/S, so Microsoft moved the entire product line away from the DOS derived 9x format, and entirely to their half of their original joint project with IBM - known as OS/2 - called Windows New Technology or Windows NT. Windows XP was the first in the line of unified NT-based Windows releases that continued through the 21st century through Windows Vista (2006), Windows 7 (2008), Windows 8.x (2013), Windows 10 (2014), and Windows 11 (2022). By the you reach the Pentium 4 category, you're running very cose to a "modern" machine, to the point you can still load a Pentium 4 with Linux and use it as a "Daily Driver", even in 2022. It won't be fast, but It'll work. Currently a lot of retro-gamers like to use these since they are still cheap, but there's no telling how long that will be because there's also a following of nostalgic younger millennials and zoomers interested in the early days of Windows NT 3D gaming such as Skyrim and GTA San Andreas.

And I think the buck should stop here, because once we start getting into 64-bit, x86 compatible, multi-core, CPU's like the AMD Athlon 64, Intel Pentium D, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, aand Core i-series still in use today, things become less and less interesting, security becomes way more restrictive, and if you're running that you might as well be running an emulator for your DOS and early Windows games nbecause at that point were talking speeds so fast even running a game from 1994 on it starts to become a bit of a challenge without some form of Emulation to weigh it down.

Clamshell Style Laptop - The Clamshell style laptop computer, or "notebook", or even smaller "Sub-Notebook" PC's are a pretty good choice for someone wanting to get into vintage hardware on limited space. These are typically best for the 80486 and early Pentium era, especially since late model DX2 SL and DX4 486 laptops, and early Pentium systems, can come with an Active Matrix LCD panel and SoundBlaster compatible audio. That said, once the Cardbarker and YYZKEVIN'S cards become a more common or popular soslution for sound, this will widen the pool to laptops from the late 386SX era as well for retro computing on the go. What's also nice is they take up a small amount of space, syou could have at leasat 5-7 of of these on a single shelf of a bookshelf and have enough computer to last you awhile even if one dies. Popular clamshells are the: IBM ThinkPad 300 and 700 series, Compaq LTE series, Toshiba Sattelite series, Toshiba Tecra series, NEC (Ultralite) Versa series, NEC Versa 2000/4000/6000 series, NanTan's various 486 and early Pentium laptops (sold under many names), The DEC/Digital hyperbooks, Gateway 2000 Colorbooks, and in the palmtop category of this we have the Toshiba Libretto as a very sought after and very tiny solution.

"LunchBox" Portables - This is a smaller category of machines that are rougly the size of a kid's lunchbox, and bridged the gap between the original "Sewing Machine" portables and the up-to-present-day Clamshell Laptops. These machines include the Compaq Portable III (286/386), Comopaq Portable 486 series, HP Network Advisor, Dolch Pack packet sniffer devices, and a multitude of "white box" luggables with LCD or plasma screens from thee late 80's and early 1990's. These were most often employed as "Packet Sniffers" or network diagnostic tools since they had desktop power in a case small enough to lug around, but just big enough to use poweful ISA and EISA network diagnostic tool cards. Later models like the Compaq Portable 486C can come with an ACtive Matrix LCD and can be easily upgraded with desktop components to have Ethernet and SoundBlaster compatible audio, far more easily than a mid-late model 486 clamshell where PCMCIA Sound cards are literal "unobtainium" right now.

"Sewing Machine" Luggables - If you're going for a truly vintage eighties PC these might be an option, though they also are in that "collectable" category. The original Luggable PC was the Compaq Portable released in 1983, which was also the computer responsible for opening up the "clone" market that led to the PC's ultimate success as a platform outside of IBM's stronghold. These are in large cases, about a foot and a half high, a foot wide, and almost 2-feet long. They usually have a CRT monochrome screen (though a few "sewing machine portables" have color screens). These include the original Compaq Portable series (Plus/286 versions included), The IBM PC Portable, Panasonic Sr. Partner, or the color Sanyo MBC775. There's also a crossover variant in the IBM PC Convertible, which was a luggable that could switch between a desktop "luggable" type setup with a CRT, to a quasi-clamshell with an LCD monitor.

AIO "All In Ones" - Some PC Manufacturers in the 80's and early 90's tried to make a PC that was in the style of a Macintosh, IE, the screen is a part of the computer on the bottom. These machines were pretty much a standard desktop PC with a 12-15" Moncohrome, MCGA, VGA, or SVGA Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) Monitor built into them. These tend to be nice for space saving if you want a desktop, but are a bit more cumbersome and a pain to work on when they need upgraded/serviced compared to a Low Profile desktop or even a regular XT/AT Desktop/Tower configuration. Also, if the monitor dies, you're done. Common variants include the IBM PS/2 Model 25, IBM EduQuest series, and Compaq CDS-5xx series.

Full Blown Desktop/Tower Setup - This is the fairly stereotypical setup of the time, either the "lay flat" desktop case or the "tower" case. Desktop cases came in various proprietary formats as well as PC/XT, AT, and Baby-AT, as well as LPX "pizza box" - which were small, low-profile cases. Typically these are the more compact of the two because you can set the monitor on top of it, which is actually more convenient as you may be switching in and out floppies and CDs a lot. Tower's stood upright and it seems they were cloned off the IBM PS/2 Model 60/80 towers initially. They come in 3 sizes, mini-tower, mid-tower, and full tower. Mini-Towers usually have less external bays than a comparable desktop but are the most common from the 386/486 era, and the Mid and Full towers can reach as tall as 3.5' tall. These are good if you want a lot of storage options and doodads installed in your vintage machine. That said,d a lot of theese might require some tuning and tweaking of your own to go to taste, but they are also the easiest to find in a bog-standard configuration that's easy to learn because others have iit already.

Best Overall 486 DX4 Class Machines - If you want to have ONE machine that can "do it all" then the 80486 DX4-100 is for you. The DX2/66 is a close runner-up, but I feel the DX4-100 is the peerfect centerpoint for performance vs. historical accuracy. It's just slow enough to run your old XT class software (well....most, up to 75% of it) properly, while just fast enough to be happy running some earlier Windows 95/98 titles, and still a lot of post 1997 DOS games by independant publishers are supported, if not quite fun on this type of machine. The WhiteBox VLB and PCI DX4 machines also offer amazing speed and power for the age, while still retaining the thing that made these Pre-Pentium machines so special. Also, it's not THAT hard to find a good one for inexpensive, or even build out out yourself from parts or upgraded from some bare-bones Socket 3 OEM system. These are so extremely popular that everyone and his dog now has been trying to build a 486 system - hilariously awesome for a class of machine I was getting chastised about for using as my daily driver 20 years ago. They also are still quite usable for modern tasks such as web surfing (Links) or making Pixel Art (Graf-X II), or even just creative writing, spreadsheets, or anything else they were used for. A killer setup like this would be a barebones DX4 setup with a VESA or PCI graphics, SoundBlaster Sound, a LAN card, SVGA (1MB+), and 16+MB of memory, and a huge 4GB+ HDD with a DDO (Ontrack 9 is great for this and addes CD-ROM Booting to the old 486 systems via the DDO boot screen). This is my favorite genre.

Best for PC/XT Class Gaming Tandy 1000 Series (A, EX, HX, SX) - The Tandy 1000 Series was a line of PC Jr Compatible XT Clones sold b Radio Shack's Tandy computer division between 1984 and 1990. The best models for PC/XT class gaming are the earliest ones, namely the A, EX, and SX being the top three. The Tandy 1000A was the second revision of the origiginal Tandy 1000, released in 1985, except it adds DMA Support, up to 640K RAM, support for an Intel 8087 math co-processor (Sim City!!), and still has decent enough case space to add a hard card or a modern CF Card adapter. The EX was a 6MHz "Turbo XT" clone in a "AIO" style case similar to an Atari 1200, Commodore Amiga 500, or Headstart Explorer - but witih all the benefits of the 1000 series, and SX is it's much beteter bigger sister with 5 expansion slots (vs the 1000A's original 3), the same 6MHz chip from the EX, dual floppies, even more chassis space for upgrades. These are a bt pricey at around $100-200 each now (thanks Young Sheldon, blech), but that's still pretty decent anyway. They also are still fairly common and not too terribly hard to come by if you look hard enough, and parts are plentiful. The only thing to watch out for is the EX uses proprietary plus cards, but there are on-line retro-parts sellers who can cell you ISA to Plus Card socket adapters for the HX/EX.

Inexpensive Laptop NanTan FMAK9200/FMAP9200 (aka DFI MediaBook, BSI, Prostar 9200M, Duracom 5110D, etc) - NanTan was a Taiwanese maker of inexpensive "Whitebox" Laptop computers sold under multiple names back in the early 1990's. They were also known as Clevo/Sager/Kapok. The 9200 series - model#'s FMAK9200 or FMAP9200 - were a quasi-socket3 compatible, 486 Sx/DX/DX2/DX4 based laptop that used upgradable desktop CPUs. They came with Monochrome STN, Color DSTN, and Active Matrix Color LCD Panels, and they tend to go for decent prices (<$100, usually around $50 or less) because nobody really knows what they are most of the time. Bit the kicker is their little rarity - they have SoundBlaster Compatible Audio, putting them close to a 486 Desktop computer in capability. They also have a fairly small footprint at roughly 10"x12"x2" with a weight around 7.5LBS. Since they have dual PCMCIA Slots it'll be fairly easy to tether to your cell phone via WiFi or connect to your home LAN on a wired network. Even the color DSTN Sanyo panels have very little ghosting and are actually, and surprisingly, quite good. However, reviving the batteries on these seems to be a difficult proposition.