Well, I'd just put some old-requeriments based distro like Hyperbola on an Atom netbook with Libre drivers, it's close to a setup from that era, I had an Athlon XP with a Geforce2 and it was like that, except the GPU on the netbook it's GL 2.1 compliant and the GF2 was GL 1.4, but for Koules, Slashem, FreeCiv, Frozen Bubble, SuperTux and such, the difference didn't matter at all.<p>On the desktop, using FVWM/TWM/CWM/Wmaker... would be literally the same as a machine using those in 2001-2004, except cwm, which evilwm it's the closest match.<p>On the memory reqs, I woudn't downgrade the distro, but set a more lightweight WM where the games would fly, such as IceWM.<p>On MESA, until release 7-9 it was very subpar, and I remember the GATOS project for ATI cards.<p>BTW, on Lincity and FreeCIV, Lincity-NG and the current FreeCIV iterations are pretty much addictive like hell and with far better graphics and many more features than the former Lincity and the GTK1 build of FreeCiv.
Also as a good joke from that era (and today still holds, as roguelikes have an age of rebirth):<p><a href="https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/02/ati_ascii.html</a>