This is exactly how it was back then, roughly from when the 386-based PC clones appeared up through Windows 7. The best thing you could do was ask the local computer stores about what configurations they were building, since they got to see more hardware come through. But they struggled too. The system the store built for me in 2001 had an Athlon Thunderbird running 1.4GHz and cooling tech hadn't caught up so it hit the failsafe temps during long sessions of Counter-Strike and Serious Sam. Later, wiser me eventually figured out, two computers later, that the power supply was probably the culprit, but this wasn't much of a topic of discussion yet - power supply efficiency wasn't a priority in the 90's.

I also had the original Voodoo card. It's rare to see a before and after divide in history so clearly. When I played Quake (and ran the time test) the first time on that Voodoo, I knew computer gaming had changed.

I hadn’t thought of that possibility but it would indeed be fantastic!

I imagine it would...I haven't tried the core, but most of them maintain the original outputs over the VGA port. Even if, for some bizarre reason it didn't, you could just enable the vga_scaler and force it.

The core is available at github and should run fine on your SS1, afaik. Be aware it's an experimental core.

https://github.com/nand2mario/z486_MiSTer

There is also a recent fork by github user janisc which is developing a direct 31khz output.

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Speaking to general : To be clear, none of these MiSTer cores include the Voodoo graphics portion discussed in the parent link.

I doubt that the degree of sheer hyper-optimisation required to get a Voodoo (plus the Pentium to make it meaningful!) into a DE10-Nano necessarily exists. Never-say-never, sure, but also, just-no - hahaha.

That work is for higher specced boards like the Xilinx discussed.

Dunno which variant you bought, but the QMTech mister clones on Ali Express are affordable, work perfectly well, and come with the expanded 128MB SDRAM expansion and analog I/O board bundled up in a convenient case. I have 2 of them, along with the MiSTer Pi, and I'll probably pick up a couple more for dedicated applicaitons (3d-printed retro computer workstation, Normal/TATE mode cab builds, and a couple just to hook up to the CRTs I have lying around).

I think I played Tomb Raider on my 486. I also seem to remember I had an S3 ViRGE graphics card, so perhaps that helped

Not require, just recommends Pentium 60 minimum. Like Quake Tomb Raider loves pipelined FPU, 30 fps on Pentium 60 vs 15 fps on 486DX2@66 and 20 on DX4@100.

I remember playing Star Fleet Academy demo on my 486DX5@133 and a Trident 3d SVGA card at slow motion in battles. The game requires a Pentium 75 or 90 and a DirectX accelerator.

If you draw front to back that could handle some of that - it does have a Z buffer.

The only PC desktop accelerator that could be considered early depth testing would be tile based 1996 PowerVR. ATI introduced HyperZ in 2000 Radeon DDR (R100), Nvidia followed in 2001 with GeForce 3 LMA. From what I remember Radeon compressed Z gains were surprisingly minimal, like 10-20% when turning it on/off, but Im sure it became crucial later on when real shaders (2.0) started being used.

Damn there is a whole ecosystem around that, e.g. https://ultimatemister.com to buy it all built, very neat.

Both require having an understanding of what you are trying to emulate. There are systems which don't have an accurate specification so they are not implemented bug free.

Do note that this very cool project does not run on the "default" MiSTer hardware. This board is $250 from AMD.