Good luck. That's entering "AC'97" territory for sound, and I don't ever recall a mobile 3dfx variant.

Laptops are generally too inflexible in their configurations and lack of upgradability to make good gaming rigs unless they are specifically designed for that purpose and there really weren't a lot of (if any) high end gaming laptops that I can recall off the top of my head during the P-III era.

Don't go older than ATI Rage Mobility 128. NVIDIA's first notebook product was GeForce 2 Go. ESS Maestro 2/3 audio is pretty decent for gaming.

Glide is not going to happen other than a Glide wrapper but you'll need a lot more recent hardware than something from 2000 to make that adequate.

Mobile PIII CPUs range from 400 MHz - 1.33 GHz but they were behind the desktop release time table.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pe … _.28180_nm.29_2

daibido1123 wrote:

Namely the right laptop to with the right graphics and cpu. I'm looking for a unit the has a graphics chip that can do Glide OpenGL and Direct3D.

Do you want some fries with that and some classical music in the background? 😜 The closest 3dfx went to integrating their stuff was integrating a Voodoo 3 to a mainboard; nothing else AFAIK. Its a shame really 😒

If I understand correctly you want to get a laptop including graphics chip and than possibly to upgrade the CPU? That may be possible within certain limits.

Judging from the release dates in these following lists
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_AM … y_Radeon_Series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Nv … orce2_Go_series
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pe … bile_processors
and of course the PIII-List swaaye already posted you can see that the GeForce4 Go and the Mobility Radeon 9000 where introduced at roughly the same time as the first mobile P4 CPUs. I don't know if there are laptops with a PIII CPU and one of these GPUs.
I found these two reviews of a GeForce4 go in a P4 laptop (possibly the same model)
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/a-new-contender,r … view-48-13.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/933/7
(GeForce4 Go is basically a GeForce 4MX except the 4200 model which was released somewhat later.)

If you can't get any of these then the Mobility Radeon 7500 is probably the best choice. Dell Inspiron 8100 seems to have this combination. I hope that DirectX 7 support is sufficient for the games you want to play.
If you really manage to find a model with a Mobility Radeon 9000 look for one with 64MB of video memory - with 32MB the memory bus is halved AFAIR.

I agree with swaaye and elfuego about Glide. 3Dfx never produced any mobile chips so you'd have to use a wrapper. Of course both nVidia and ATI have no problems with Direct3D and OpenGL.

I agree that you should not get a P4, and I don't know about driver support for Windows 98 SE on Pentium M machines so you might be right about wanting a PIII machine. Usually I'd prefer at least a Pentium M.

You might consider looking for a model with a screen resolution of 1024x768 depending on the games you play. I don't know much the performance will suffer with higher resolutions and you probably know that not using the native resolution results in a blurred image.
OTOH it seems that you want to run games that won't run on Windows 2000 or Windows XP so they are probably not that demanding on the GPU.

BTW, shouldn't this thread go to Marvin and not to PC?

Good luck!

I wouldn't go with a Radeon. They are troublesome with Direct3D 3-5 games because of ATI not supporting some features. ATI in general is a bad choice for anything OpenGL that is not Quake-based.

GeForce 2 Go or 4 MX would be ideal I think. Otherwise Rage Mobility 128 unless Radeon is known not to be quirky with whatever you want to play.

Thread moved to Marvin

Ge Force 2 Go came out during the Pentium 4/Windows XP era, though, didn't it?

Sure but it shouldn't be hard to get 98 on a notebook of that time.

The GeForce 2 always struck me more as a late-P3 era card myself. 😜 I mean, one would probably work fine in a Pentium 4 box if you're looking for basic graphics support (or at least something slightly better than the godawful Intel onboard graphics from the time), but really compared to most other early-2000s cards I think using one would be sort of a bottleneck. 😜

daibido1123 wrote:

I am looking to build a Windows 98 SE gaming laptop, but I am having trouble finding the right shell and parts.

If you're thinking custom gaming laptops like the modern ones you can easily build-to-order today, then congratulations, you're into the wrong era! (how about XP instead?) 😀 But if you insist...

Namely the right laptop to with the right graphics and cpu. I'm looking for a unit the has a graphics chip that can do Glide OpenGL and Direct3D.

As said above, you can only make do with Glide wrapper on laptop, and you'll need a later-gen, DirectX 9-supporting GPU. I think the option that will make sense here is GeForce FX Go5x00 series (at least the desktop versions are generally good for older games). Try to find the 5600/5650/5700 version for adequate speed.

As for the CPU the fastest mobile PIII,

Why limit yourself to PIII? Pentium M is a direct descendant of the Pentium III, and AFAIK also the latest mobile platform you can find Win98SE drivers for.

Which brings us to the important issue here: finding older OS drivers for older laptop models can be real tricky. You'll have it easy with IBM/Lenovo, but AFAIK they didn't have a Win98SE-compatible model with NVIDIA graphics.

----edit----
actually they have one, the G41 (FX Go5200) -- but Win98SE drivers are not complete
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/research/hint … &DocID=HT072389
(listed under "Windows ME" )

also:
http://forums.laptopvideo2go.com/topic/5688-g … 5xxx-notebooks/
------------

and when it comes to drives, the drives can be swapped out between CD/DVD and Floppy.

Good luck on this one!

archsan wrote:

Why limit yourself to PIII? Pentium M is a direct descendant of the Pentium III, and AFAIK also the latest mobile platform you can find Win98SE drivers for.

Systems with a Pentium M might be a bit too new. Like Leilei said, you are already into the AC97 era of sound cards with some Pentium III laptops and I hope that I am assuming correctly that by that she meant that it would likely break compatibility with a lot of software that supports only SB 16 or SB Pro.

@sliderider

OP seems to be asking for just "Windows 98SE" and doesn't mention DOS or SB/SB16 compatibility specifically. I have a circa-2004 Celeron M Thinkpad R50e which has the AC97 (ADI SoundMax) which plays game from DX 6 era such as NFS3HP just fine.

Also, faster Pentium M will be powerful enough to run even later DOS games in DOSBox if needed. This will solve SB/SB16 compatibility problem -- unless OP want to have pure DOS mobile gaming experience, that is.

I have a Pentium M laptop myself (specifically a 2004 vintage Acer Travelmate 4502Lmi, easily one of the most reliable machines I've ever owned 😁) that I'm thinking of converting into a portable retro gaming rig, and I know for a fact that it can run most DOS games made up until the mid-late 90s quite well on DOSBox. As for the more demanding stuff (Warcraft II, Carmageddon, Duke Nukem 3D), I'm going to try my luck with a small Win98 partition and/or VDMSound.

I can say from personal experience that I retro "gaming" laptop is a tuff one. Gaming on laptops "high end" laptops anyway really didn't start till the Pentium 4 windows xp era when people like dell (alienware) started putting gaming laptops out. People didn't game on laptops, so laptops never really got great gaming hardware. For a retro build, A destop is really the way you want to swing. But if you don't have the space, A newer laptop with VMware or a dual-boot would do you just great.

I personally have a lenovo T61 that I used for playing older games. But the battery in it is really going bad (second battery) and I just don't use it as much as I should when I have like 9 desktops hanging around.

Geeze, and I use my T60 as my primary laptop. Thing still has a better screen than anything you can get for less than $1000.