.

I second Paul N. Lee suggestion. This is what I have been doing (and saying) for years. I use a stack of P3 systems, stripped bare, running native DOS or Win98SE configured to boot directly to DOS-7. The highest end P3 (933 MHz, or so) seems to be the best. You can get these for as little as 20-50$ at any local computer repair/salvage/2nd hand shop.

As for current systems, I have confirmed that Athlon chips work much better than Intel, and some graphics cards work very good, some suck. This is hit and miss - I don't know the reason. WinXP or Media edition doesn't seem to be a problem IF you have the right system. You can also create a FAT32 partition on your HD and boot with a Win98 boot disk or CD.

Hope this helps.

.