First post, by sirnephilim
I got lucky on the Bay of E a while back, saw a listing for a For-Parts Satellite 225CDS.
It's a bit of a hidden gem, having a Yamaha YMF718 or 19 (not sure which) sound card built in and a fairly good 2MB video card. It's a Pentium 133MHz with 16 or 32MB of RAM stock. This one was the 32MB variant though it only has a passive screen.
Ended up only having a couple of serious issues, notably not coming with a charger and the battery was unable to hold a charge. First was fixed by finding a 15V 4A power supply on Amazon and soldering the right size barrel jack to it, and the latter I found on a parts website for $25. (So yeah, almost tripled my costs there.) Minor issues were only one PS/2 port which doesn't seem to work with my pigtail, so mouse only and no tenkeys or full sized keyboard only and a nub mouse. (Or maybe a serial mouse and PS/2 keyboard?) and the overall condition of the chassis is poor.
Since I didn't want to use it for anything but DOS games the 32MB of RAM is more than enough, but the 1.5GB hard drive was a problem. I snagged a 128GB MSATA drive from a kaput machine at work and got a 44-pin 2.5" IDE adapter. Lacking floppy disks and the unit not having come with a CD-ROM (I believe they all came with swappable drives?) I had to set up FreeDOS in VirtualBox and copy all my games to it in Windows (it's FAT32 so that was easy, and I already had a giant VHD with tons of DOS games I use on my MiSTer).
Plugged the drive in, attached to my old SyncMaster CRT and a PS/2 mouse and it works like a dream! Handles Quake, Duke3D, all my old Sierra games, etc. with only the occasional reboot to switch between memory managers. Granted it looks like a piece of garbage - most of the port covers are missing and the screen latch is cracked nearly in half - but hey for a total project cost of under $100 I'm not complaining. Sound was excellent and the OPL3 sounds exactly as it should, and when you're on an external monitor the picture is great.
I do wish it had a Game/MPU401 port for use with joysticks and MIDI devices, and a CD-ROM drive would be rather nice (I should get a PCMCIA/SCSI drive - would work with my Amiga as well as this), and an active matrix screen would be ideal but for what it is and what I paid I'm extremely happy with it.
If you're looking for a one-stop machine for 90's era gaming I highly recommend the 225CDS. Might not be the best possible laptop for the job but it's certainly a good option.
And if anyone has a line on the port replicator or an original CD-ROM drive I'd be very appreciative!