I found a box of CD-Roms and floppy disks in my mum's basement and damnit, I want to play them! I could use emulators, DosBox or VMs but it's never quite the same as having the real thing, so between an eBay mobo and a box of old parts I managed to build my new gaming rig to cover 1990-2005.
Its running a P3 at 1GHz, 512MB of ram, and an ATI Xpert98 with 8MB of memory. As I didn't want to run an old IDE drive with a million hours on it, I tried an SATA-IDE adapter, it caused some issues during the install but that just felt like the standard Windows experience.
Though unpopular, I went with ME for 2 reasons, the first was Dos support, the second is that I went from W95 to ME as a kid, 98 wouldn't have felt the same. The install bricked twice with video drivers but I finally got it up and running with the default drivers and an 18" Samsung flat CRT (runs up to 1600x1200 at a nauseating 60hz).
So what were your favorite games from the 90's and early 2000s?
Up voted for recommending real Roland hardware. I have an MT-32, CM-32L, and SC-55mkII to cover all my compatibility bases.
I would also suggest the modern emulated alternatives if you struggle to get hold of the original hardware
MT32-pi: https://github.com/dwhinham/mt32-pi (covers the MT-32 & CM-32, can also do some general midi with sound fonts, so in theory you could emulate a soundcanvas too)
Then there's the sound cards too
PicoGUS: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/ (emulates a Gravis Ultrasound, SB2, AdLib, Tandy & also the MPU401 if you do end up with real midi hardware)
Also gonna just drop the goldlib too: https://pcmidi.eu/goldlib.html but that one might be a bit separate from what OP is currently doing