The ESS ISA chipsets have great DOS and Windows support. The PCI chipsets have DOS support too but all PCI sound chips are hit and miss for DOS. A nice thing about a Maestro 2 is that it has good A3D support (heard it myself).

For video, I'd look for a Mobility Radeon or GeForce 2 Go. You could look at a Rage Mobility but Rage kinda blows IMO.

A P3 Coppermine-based notebook would probably be the way to go.

I would not go older because the graphics chips lose proper LCD image scaling. You don't want to get one that only does pixel stretch because it looks terrible at non-native resolutions. Rage and newer and I'm sure the Geforce aren't an issue. I've used Pentium MMX and 486 notebooks with pixel stretch and it sucks.

Frankly I personally don't like to mess with old notebooks, especially for DOS games. The sound hardware in particular is not ideal. Also, the '90s LCDs weren't so great even when they were new (response time in particular). You certainly don't want to get a dual scan or passive matrix LCD (the popular screens in the mid'90s and earlier) because they are blur fests. IMO the best DOS notebook is something that can run DOSBOX.

So for Win98 specs, how does this look?

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X22

For Win98 it's probably fine but I don't think the Intel AC97 audio will do DOS support at all.

Yah, I need to find somebody with a CS4297 or CS4299 laptop to be sure. It shouldn't be hard.

I checked around. It seems anything with ESS audio is on an older Pentium 1 laptop. Yah, those would suck too much.

ESS Maestro 2 is in a lot of Pentium 3 notebooks. I worked on two P3 notebooks with it recently. One was a Compaq, the other a big Dell. I really did like how that Maestro sounded with A3D games. I was stunned honestly. I think it's probably the best notebook audio chip there is for 9x gaming.

If you mean ESS ISA chips, yeah I would think those are likely only going to show up in Pentium 1 notes. I had a ESS1688 in an old Dell Pentium MMX notebook and a ESS688 in a 486 notebook. They do SBPro quite well in DOS without any TSRs or drivers. But those old notebooks had horrendously awful LCD scaling as I described before. I could switch from letterboxed or nasty-stretch though, but letterboxed gets tiny at 320x200.

It looks like the Compaq Armada M700 is one of the few laptops which fit that description. The M300 would have been good too, but it only has 4Mb of video RAM. I need 8Mb.

There is another choice for a PIII, Win98 with ESS Maestro, but it has an S3 Savage 1X video. Any opinion about that?

Anything from S3 will be questionable for 3D games. They just couldn't write quality drivers and I imagine that the hardware isn't so hot itself. It sounds like it may be able to run Unreal adequately at 640x480. It's probably similar to a Savage 3D.

If you want to play D3D/OpenGL games you really shouldn't stray from ATI or NVIDIA.

I just bought an Armada M700 from eBay.

valnar wrote:

I just bought an Armada M700 from eBay.

Cool. I had one of those recently. I even made a thread about it on here. 😀 It should be a pretty nice machine for old games. I ran some Jedi Knight on it and a few other things.

The Rage Pro is a bit of a driver mystery but I found a good reference for that.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060427060938/www … hosein/rpro.htm

He, whadaya know. I just took your recommendations for ESS Audio, ATI video, PIII and Win98 driver compatibility and that Compaq came up as one of the few choices. Too bad I can't get it with a 2ms S-IPS panel with hardware scaling.
😁

I have the Armada M700 now and installed Win98 with all drivers. I see the multitude of ESS Maestro drivers in Device Manager, including DOS/SBPro support on 220/5/1. But for some reason, none of my DOS games in a Win98 DOS window have any sound. It's like it doesn't see the SBPro compatibility. The environment variable is correct as setup by the sound drivers (BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T4). DOS games cannot detect it correctly. Sound works in Windows just fine.

Any ideas?

Have you tried pure DOS mode?

Yah, doesn't work in pure DOS mode, but I might need to find separate drivers for that too.

I did find this though....

The original Armada Win98 drivers had several entries in Device Manager, including a separate one for MPU-401, SBPro/FM, etc. There was a master driver too (forget the name...because I changed it). The DOS driver specifically listed 220,5,1. All that was correct in the environment variable. The MIDI driver said I could load a 2Mb or 4Mb sample size. All seemed good, but no DOS sound in Win98 under a command prompt.

Then I found an updated Win98 driver which was the WDM version I presume. I now have a single entry called ESS Maestro2E PCI Audiodrive (WDM). The only IRQ listed now is 11 instead of multiple like before. But sound now works for DOS games under Win98! However, the MIDI section in Win98 shows the Roland softsynth, not the ESS Maestro hardware synth. So even though it works now, it's a generic Windows neutered sound.

Might want to dig up the Yamaha S-YXG50 and the updated 4MB patch set for it. I can't imagine that the ESS synth is worth bothering with but I haven't tried it myself.

Here's ESS driver page from ~2005
http://web.archive.org/web/20050101092620/htt … rivers.shtm#pci

Don't forget to check out the Maestro 2's A3D support. It's pretty good! They use Sensaura algorithms I think. I tried it out with Jedi Knight which uses A3D 1.0.

Hello guys! It's my 1st post here, nice to meet you! 😀

Sorry for digging this very old thread but I got the same exact problem with my Compaq Armada m700. I recently installed Win98SE and downloaded all drivers from HP website. In Win98 everything works just fine but when I try to play DOS games I've got sound issues, sometimes there's no sound at all, sometimes got sound only partially... I think I need these drivers

valnar wrote:

...Then I found an updated Win98 driver which was the WDM version I presume. I now have a single entry called ESS Maestro2E PCI Audiodrive (WDM)...

. I tried to find them online but every link is dead, can you somehow help me please? It'd be awesome, I really want to make this laptop ultimate Win98 machine 😉

Hello, I respond as there are no replies so far..

The chipset seems to be the ES1978(?), so for Windows 95/98 you may need Compaq's softpaq no. 18571 (sp18571.exe).
There's also one for 2000/XP (sp20191.exe)..

Note, that you can also try WDM drivers made for Win2000 on Win98SE.
This works sometimes, because the whole purpose of WDM was to unify driver development of both Windows lines.
But please make some backups first. The whole story is rather hit or miss and especially the audio systems of 2K/XP and 98SE are quite different.

Besides, there is also a WDM driver at CNET (ESS Maestro 2e WDM Audio Drivers Ver. 5.12.01.2066, M2WUA06I.EXE)..
It contains a drivers file, wdma_es2.inf, which mentions something about Windows 98.
Maybe it's compatible, at least ther'es no VXD in sight.

Hope you get it working! 😀

Best regards,
Jo22