Yeah, it’s an interesting thread worth continuing.
My dedicated DOS PC is a Pentium 150 with 48MB of RAM, a 1.5 GB HD, Trident 64V+ onboard graphics, Sound Blaster 32 (a slightly less fully featured version of the AWE32), and a 16x CD-ROM drive.
This PC runs FreeDOS Beta 9 Revision 5 (this isn’t the latest stable release, but I’ll only upgrade when v. 1.0 is finally released), which uses its own CD-ROM controller, namely SHSUCDX instead of MS-DOS’s MSCDEX. This creates problems with some games, e.g. Inherit the Earth CD (an excellent adventure game), Flashback CD (luckily the original disk version works fine and is much better anyway), etc., and some audio CD player utilities. And for some reason, all of the classic Origin releases fail to run on FreeDOS. Why that is, I have no idea.
My regular home office/gaming PC runs Win98SE, which is fine for many DOS games, but it still feels somehow good being able to play these classics on an actual DOS PC.
Oh, and as a tip to those thinking of building dedicated DOS gaming PCs, Univbe has been released to the public and is available free of charge from http://www.scitechsoft.com/ftp/sdd/univbe67.exe . You can load it through a simple line in the autoexec.bat file: lh c:\univbe\univbe.exe, with c:\univbe being the directory to which it was installed. It’ll improve the running of graphic intensive DOS games, and make many others more compatible with your specific graphics setup.