swaaye wrote:

I'm kinda into old notebooks that had decent gaming capabilities. Anyone have favorites? Or maybe just talk about gaming experiences with old notebooks...

I used to play Descent online through Kali on a Acom Patriot 4000 486DX2 66 (apparently a Sager OEM machine.) I also used to have a Dell Latitude LM, one of the first Pentium MMX notebooks. It had a Neomagic Magicgraph 128 that was interesting because it used embedded DRAM and was one of the first chips to do so.

I always smirk when I see online conversations about "slow" LCDs these days. I imagine that such people never saw dual scan or passive matrix screens. 😀

I'm into the same thoughts as you 😀
At my former work about 3years ago I inherited my boss old laptop...an AST Ascentia VL which has a Pentium 200MMX, 32mb RAM, 2gig hdd with win98, cd-rom, floppy drive, ATI RAGE LT 2mb gfx, ESS1869 built in audio and built in stereo speakers.
Last weekend I dug out the machine and started using it for real for the first time...battery doesn't hold it's charge for more than 5min max 😜 and the display must have a response time of 1000ms 🤣 😁
I configured it to boot to boot into pure win98 DOS and configured the ESS audio stuff to work in DOS (Sb Pro compatible sound), installed mouse and cd-rom drivers.
It has some issues...some games have corrupt gfx and the screen isn't stretched so it fits the screen in pure DOS..it's letterboxed all around
My plan is to upgrade the ram to it's max..256mb, get a new battery maybe and fit a faster and bigger harddrive
AST machines are quite rare here in Sweden.

There's usually a way to get old notes to stretch to full screen, but it'll look terrible cuz they don't do fancy scaling like today's hardware. Just a rough pixel stretch. The option is either in the BIOS or is a Fn hotkey.

That's a nice P200MMX. Rage GPU is definitely better than a Neomagic chip. The Neomagic chips had very limited resolution choices. I remember wanting to try to play Unreal but couldn't because the lowest res available was 640x400 or 512x384.

My personal favorite is the Toshiba Tecra 730

- Pentium MMX 150MHz
- real YMF262 (CS4232)
- can underclock to 75mhz
- CD-rom drive built in, floppy drive external
- 1024x768 native
- LCD ghosting isn't too bad, not that blurry.
- Brightish screen
- Its battery life doesn't suck even after the battery is 12 years old
- Bulky-ish, but reliable and not as fragile as similar compaq, ibm or dell laptops

I once had a couple of old Thinkpad 701's, the one with the keyboard that splits and shifts so the close laptop is a few inches narrower than when its open. They had 50mhz 486DX5 I think, or maybe 75. I upgraded one to an AMD 133, seem to recall a debate about whether it made any difference because of the 486 being dx4. I certainly didnt notice any. Motherboard swap was interesting as I got an IBM video to take me through it, but the parts are so-o-o delicate compared to a desktop. Still, its quite fun to hunt down old parts, though unlike desktops they are model-specific very often. Big row with a dealer over a hd that wouldnt run in it.

The two 701's had different types of LCD, one was much crisper than the other but went on the blink and died. The other was I guess an old TFT type, really blurry - in 3d games you left a constant trail of pixels behind you. They handled Doom all right. No CD drive so I installed bigger things by sticking the hd into a desktop and copying across. I discovered some wheeze that meant it recognised one partition as a CD drive [hence WC1 installed and played]. Nice caddy on them designed so you could just pull it out, so hard drive swapping was fast and easy. In fact that was a better design feature than the keyboard, which seemed to keep giving me electric shocks.