I realise that the Voodoo 4 & 5 cards still have some life left in them.  Arguably they can still deliver some of the finest AA you can get for games like flight and driving sims.  Additionally they provide exemplary support for online games based on such things as the Unreal game engine.

But five years from now?

There are many legacy games that can and will only look and run at their best on 3Dfx (or 3dfx) cards.  I plan on having a Voodoo2 SLI system installed as long as there are PCI slots to support it.  Currently I am playing the original GTA (brought on by GTA3), Carmageddon in DOS glide (brought on by bloody mindedness) and 3Dfx Shadow Warrior.  I don't want the inevitable march of progress to prevent me from playing these and similar games in all their glory on a 3Dfx card.  For a significant time 3Dfx led the field and games were written specifically for their cards.

I've always been grateful for the backwards compatibility of the PC.  I play many games that will only run in DOS (let alone Windows 95/98 and completely forgetting XP).  We're going to lose this and I'm going to have to set up something I've been avoiding.  A legacy PC. 

Yes, there's CPU speed, but also the ever changing field of PC "standards".  There are already "legacy free" motherboards for sale trying to make it look like missing some features is in some way clever.

I watched my precious ISA slots being eaten away, the floppy disk drive is becoming optional, serial and parallel ports will be subsumed by USB and firewire, and PCI slots will be next. 

I agree that dual booting is a good route to take.  But, when the hardware itself gets too incompatible, there will be no alternative for the truly dedicated PC gamer but to build a separate legacy system.

Running old Programs on new Computers is an interesting Topic. On one hand staying compatible to those old Programs in new operating systems makes them bigger and hard to configure because of all those old libriaries and technics. Remember the Dos-Background  from 1982 DOS till 2000 in WIN ME. So it blocks new technologies because the os has to be compatible. On the other Hand  we all want to run our old apps'n'games in the new os. Only less companies make updates and ports. This is the same thing that prevents Linux from beeing an alternative on the desktop. As long as your favorite game won't be ported to linux or does not run under DOSEMU or WINE your are stuck. Emulators are great things but need so much more CPU Power and RAM you can only run very old Programs. The day that you can run all your old DOS games with GLIDE in an emulator is far. ..

Regards,
Andreas

You are absolutely right  procerus. A perfect emulator has to emulate different processors at different speed's with different controllers. For that you need the knowledge of all the hardware interna of many different chips (are the internas of 3dfx chips available?). This needs enormous cpu-power. A good c64 emulator tha emulates the 2 1mhz 8bit cpu's that the c64 and it's floppy have needs minimum a Pentium with 133 MHZ.  What Power must a cpu have to fully emulate a Pentium 133? Most emulators now are more like vdm's that run most of the code native.  But a dos-window is also some kind of a vdm and remember how much problems old dos-games have in a window...

Bye,
Andreas