coppercitymt wrote:

My on thought would be there is massive lack of hardware no add in graphics cards and sound blaster cards and so on, Could you replace a good DOS desktop with a laptop?

Yes if:

1) its good enough to run DOSbox
2) it has a screen that can scale the EGA/VGA nicely

Pure dos is almost impossible because of lack of DOS drivers, but emulated is ok.

lcdrugo has a thread on this topic. One big issue you'll run into with vintage laptops is ghosting on the screens, but in a lot of cases you can hook up an external monitor to solve that. If you just want to play games in DOS and not deal with hardware or drivers, you might as well use DOSbox. 😁

P4 laptops are vintage now 🙄

If you run DOSbox you don't need to care about add-in graphics and sound cards, on the other hand, if you want to use it as a real DOS/Win9x machine, you can use a PCMCIA sound card to get sound in pure DOS and sometime Sound blaster emulation in Win9x.

As for the grapich cards update, some old laptops (by HP and IBM) can use ISA and/or PCI cards in their docking stations.
More recent ones fom Lenovo can use PCI-e cards, so you're not fixed with a cheap mobile integrated graphic card.