I wonder if buying old PCs and salvaging them for parts could be a cheaper option? It would probably involve a lot of digging to find what you are after though. What games are you going to play?
There were actually some words in there that I understood! Curious as to what games you are looking at as well.
I probably have old unused parts that might be worthwhile as drop ins on a system like that.drivers and XP were always a problem.These days you might just be better of setting up a VDI on your main PC or similar, but sure is a nice nostalgia project
USB 1 is slower than DVD ROM Well at least in my experience it has been On my newer system I use USB sticks all the time for things and the read/write speed is faster (still only USB 2) but the write speed tends to be a bit slower on the older machine