You might want to try a live distro, such as Knoppix (Debian) or Slax (Slackware Live) and see how you like it. They are very well at configuring support for a system, and they come on a single cd. While most Linux Distros are usually free, they sometimes require you to pay for continued customer support and sometimes upgrades. Off the top of my head I can only really count on one or two hands the number of companies that require payment for software. A few games play well on Linux using WineX/Cedega, but there can often be a few bugs that arise trying to run them.
Thanks I'm not so much worried about the games, I have DOS 6.22, Win98se, and Xp SP2.I just want to experiment with some of the alternatives.I've tried downloading SUSE off the net before and could not get it to boot in fact I had to pry open my CD drive with a butter knife just to get the disk out.At the time it was an old beater and I had alot of spare parts laying around, nowadays I have more working computers than spare parts.