My Toshiba 4010CDT works exactly as yours in the sound department, senrew. The only difference being that the Control I/O Address is 538h instead.

I also took more photos of the lappy (including the rebuilt battery pack which surely would get me flagged as a terrorist!) and since the 2h40m runtime I quoted was from 2008~2009 I decided to test it again. I left it playing some .mod tunes with power management options disabled until it powered off, and it managed to survive for 3 hours and 8 minutes. Not bad!

PhaytalError wrote:

There are several laptops from that era that used real Yamaha YM262-M chips (OPL3)! :D […]
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mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I know that back in the 90s, there was really no such thing as a "gaming" laptop, but I'm wondering if there were any laptops made in the mid-late 90s that were decent at all for DOS/Win9x gaming. What I would be looking for is like Soundblaster compatibility, decent VESA support and 2D acceleration, and a tolerable screen.

As for the games I would want to play on it, I'm thinking like Build engine games, older RTSs (StarCraft, WarCraft II, the first few Command and Conquer games), and just other stuff you would play on a typical Pentium 1/2 system.

There are several laptops from that era that used real Yamaha YM262-M chips (OPL3)! 😁

The ones that come to mind are:

Compaq Armada 1598DT (Intel MMX)
Compaq Armada 1700 (Pentium II)
Thinkpad 760el (100/120/133mhz Intel CPU's)
Toshiba Tecra 8000 (Pentium II or Pentium III CPU's -- Pentium II 366Mhz model allows for UT to be playable and both Pentium II and Pentium III modles had overall near desktop performance, a really high end laptop for the time -- not sure if the Pentium III modles had Yamaha YM262-M chips though as it used a different motherboard )
Toshiba Libretto 50 all the way through 110 (Varied)

Any of those from the above mentioned should give you nice performance and let you have real OPL3 FM synth. 😎

Also if I remember correctly, certain Toshiba Portege xxxCT models as well, however I don't remember specifically which modles.

IBM Mwave laptops also have FM synth, but it's royally jacked up and IBM never fixed the issue because those laptops were intended for business useage.

Do any of those laptops stretch 320x200 games to fullscreen, or do they display 320x200 games letterboxed?

I would go for libretto 110CT

http://www.toshiba-europe.com/bv/computers/pr … ct/product.shtm

Also you can put 96mb with some hacks and fit a 3D gpu with the desktio dock

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Do any of those laptops stretch 320x200 games to fullscreen, or do they display 320x200 games letterboxed?

Good question, i'm not overly sure. I did some some digging around the web though, someone posted back in the day that the Toshiba Tecra 8000 has a display option in BIOS to strech so that 320x200 does full screen when he uses it to game, I have no way to confirm this though and it seems to be the only post in regards to the question at hand.

Other than that, I have no idea.

Here are my retro laptops:

On the left is an ICL N4/25, powered by an Intel 486SX-25. It has only PC speaker with no upgrade options, and a monochrome LCD which displays 256 colours as 64 shades of grey. So it's pretty much worthless for gaming.
The laptop on the right is a Dell Latitude XPi P133ST which has more interesting specs:
CPU: Pentium I 133MHz
RAM: 24MB
Video: Neomagic MagicGraph NM2070 40kB on 800x600 256-colour STN panel
Audio: ESS ES1688, mono speaker, stereo line-out. Digital volume control using Fn-key.

Here are some pictures of the Neomagic card and LCD panel with a CRT on the VGA output for comparison.
80x25 font:
LCD: http://imageshack.us/a/img713/3050/3gdk.jpg
CRT: http://imageshack.us/a/img31/5341/ntkq.jpg
Prety ugly, but not too bad on CRT. Note the slash, it's not exactly straight.

80x50 font:
LCD: http://imageshack.us/a/img43/2346/r159.jpg
CRT: http://imageshack.us/a/img845/953/31an.jpg
Even more ugly, and even worse on the CRT.

320x200 (displayed as 800x600 letterboxed):
LCD: http://imageshack.us/a/img69/2566/gbri.jpg
CRT: http://imageshack.us/a/img10/1656/8mv9.jpg
LCD: http://imageshack.us/a/img163/2680/mhdv.jpg
CRT: http://imageshack.us/a/img34/6954/h0eq.jpg
With scaling disabled, 320x200 is displayed as 16:9 (square pixels). This means the aspect ratio on the CRT is also wrong.

320x200 scaled to 800x600:
LCD: http://imageshack.us/a/img96/2459/ogoj.jpg
CRT: http://imageshack.us/a/img823/4228/9h1u.jpg

LCD response time:
http://imageshack.us/a/img163/6113/92f3.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img546/5816/uznw.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img849/5509/kx9l.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img42/5756/oumr.jpg
LCD seems to be lagging at least one frame behind. Notice the tearing on the last pic!

Next thing I'm gonna try is Speedsys.

The ICL rocks, looks brand new .

It sure looks like it didn't see much use. I even have the original suitcase, manual and power supply with it 😀
But the monochrome LCD is just... horrible. It's extremely slow, has low contrast, and very bad ghosting problems:
http://imageshack.us/a/img811/769/fx2s.jpg
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/7949/3x79.jpg
It's actually pretty colourful for a mono screen though 🤣

Also, another pic of the integer scaling on the Dell (640x480 to 800x600): http://imageshack.us/a/img69/410/d3j3.jpg

Here are the Speedsys results, both laptops have a fast/slow setting so I tested both speeds:

ICL "fast" option: http://imageshack.us/a/img20/8057/8t3e.png
ICL "slow" option: http://imageshack.us/a/img853/4975/mlor.png

The ICL only seems to disable cache on slow setting. But the memory throughput is much higher than normal!

Dell "133MHz" option: http://imageshack.us/a/img21/4002/van6.png
Dell "compatible" option: http://imageshack.us/a/img199/8943/rw0z.png

The Dell is kinda weird. First of all the hard disk graph looks completely wrong. But it does some interesting things when slowed down. Look at that memory speed graph, and notice the bandwidth.. it goes down to 7.6MB/s!

Maybe I should open a separate topic for these laptops. Don't want to hijack this thread too much with my LCD bashing.

I used to have a Dell Latitude LM. That was a P133 MMX with Neomagic Magicgraph 128ZV, ESS ES1688, 12.1" active matrix LCD. Etc. The aliased non-native resolution scaling above certainly reminds me of it. Uhg.

Other things I didn't like were 1) MPIIX southbridge has no DMA IDE support 2) Neomagic has pathetic support for low resolutions in Win9x so can't go low enough to get the speed up in some games.

But prior to that I had a 486DX4 notebook with a dual-scan (passive matrix) LCD. The active matrix screen is a big step up. People who whine about ghosting today haven't used a passive matrix screen 🤣

PhaytalError wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

There are several laptops from that era that used real Yamaha YM262-M chips (OPL3)! 😁

The ones that come to mind are:

Compaq Armada 1700 (Pentium II)

I can attest to the quality of the Compaq Armada 1700. I used one as a daily laptop through 2007-ish. The default model ships (shipped) with either a 266 or 300MHz Pentium II Deschutes (512kB L2, half speed). But the chipset and processor is on the Intel MMC-1 module which is replaceable. I replaced the stock 266 with the 400MHz module, which is a "Dixon" (256 kB L2, full speed) and it worked without issue. If you can still find one that is.

Also note that the official Compaq documentation references a maximum memory size of 160 MB (32 onboard + 128 MB DIMM). But you can put in a 256MB DIMM and max out at 288. I had no problems with this.

The ATA controller is ATA/33 iirc and supports DMA. I'm not sure what the "maximum" hard drive size could be, but with the latest BIOS I had no issues with a 40 GB drive. So I suppose the next limit would be 128 GB.

It uses a C&T 65555 video chipset. In theory it supports DirectX through version 5.0 in hardware but this doesn't include Direct3D.

Compaq shipped a DVD module for this system and I had issues getting the Margi DVD-2-Go card and the C&T video chipset to play along. I kept getting complaints about video memory size errors (not enough free, even though 2MB was "supported"). Part of the problems may have been the drivers - it seemed to work fine in Win9x but not in Windows 2000. The Margi driver for Windows 2000 and XP were "beta" and never finalized so who knows.

I believe I ended up finding PowerDVD 4.0 worked best. I'm not sure that used the Margi card, but with the 400MHz PII it didn't seem to matter.

You get 2 CardBus slots (one of which supports ZoomedVideo), a PS/2 port, serial, DB-25 parallel, and USB 1.1 (1 port).

Aside from the video-DVD funkiness I never had any problems and the machine took everything I threw at it. Just seemed really well made.

Incidentally, though there is no 3D support, Quake II ran fast enough in software. 😉

EverythingOldIsNewAgain wrote:

I can attest to the quality of the Compaq Armada 1700. I used one as a daily laptop through 2007-ish. The default model ships (s […]
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PhaytalError wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

There are several laptops from that era that used real Yamaha YM262-M chips (OPL3)! 😁

The ones that come to mind are:

Compaq Armada 1700 (Pentium II)

I can attest to the quality of the Compaq Armada 1700. I used one as a daily laptop through 2007-ish. The default model ships (shipped) with either a 266 or 300MHz Pentium II Deschutes (512kB L2, half speed). But the chipset and processor is on the Intel MMC-1 module which is replaceable. I replaced the stock 266 with the 400MHz module, which is a "Dixon" (256 kB L2, full speed) and it worked without issue. If you can still find one that is.

Also note that the official Compaq documentation references a maximum memory size of 160 MB (32 onboard + 128 MB DIMM). But you can put in a 256MB DIMM and max out at 288. I had no problems with this.

The ATA controller is ATA/33 iirc and supports DMA. I'm not sure what the "maximum" hard drive size could be, but with the latest BIOS I had no issues with a 40 GB drive. So I suppose the next limit would be 128 GB.

It uses a C&T 65555 video chipset. In theory it supports DirectX through version 5.0 in hardware but this doesn't include Direct3D.

Compaq shipped a DVD module for this system and I had issues getting the Margi DVD-2-Go card and the C&T video chipset to play along. I kept getting complaints about video memory size errors (not enough free, even though 2MB was "supported"). Part of the problems may have been the drivers - it seemed to work fine in Win9x but not in Windows 2000. The Margi driver for Windows 2000 and XP were "beta" and never finalized so who knows.

I believe I ended up finding PowerDVD 4.0 worked best. I'm not sure that used the Margi card, but with the 400MHz PII it didn't seem to matter.

You get 2 CardBus slots (one of which supports ZoomedVideo), a PS/2 port, serial, DB-25 parallel, and USB 1.1 (1 port).

Aside from the video-DVD funkiness I never had any problems and the machine took everything I threw at it. Just seemed really well made.

Incidentally, though there is no 3D support, Quake II ran fast enough in software. 😉

Cool. How well could it run Unreal or Unreal Tournament? If I could get one of those running at a decent speed, even in software mode, that would be awesome.

Slightly less retro, but has anyone managed to put Windows 9x on a recent-ish Thinkpad?

Found an x200s in the "junk computer" section of a computer store here in Akamon-dori (think of it as a smaller Akihabara) for about 9000yen.
It POSTs, but there is no OS, and the condition tag just lists the rather shabby exterior casing and worn keyboard (no actual functional issues). There is also a stack of x61 and x60s (1 year older and 2 years older than the x200) for about 5000yen each in similar condition.
I don't own any PCs anymore (on this continent anyways) as I switched to Mac about 8 years ago, but I've always loved the Thinkpad bento aesthetic and running older games natively would be nice.

My only concern is drivers really...

The ThinkPad T40p comes to mind. I played many games on my T40p at the time and those worked fine.

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail.page?L … ocID=migr-46451

A T series of that vintage would be my first choice, but there aren't any..
There aren't 9x drivers on IBM's page, but it may be possible to track them down individually from the component makers...

http://page3.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/c432984829

Not bad, but the machine has a lot of problems.

Admin password is set (no way to reset on a thinkpad other than shorting some pins on an IC on the mobo, there is no hdd and the mount for one is broken, bios battery looks dead, no ac adaptor, broken card slot, etc.
Seller says he doesn't know if it actually works beyond the initial password screen. If it was local it might be worth considering though...

Jarvik7 wrote:

Slightly less retro, but has anyone managed to put Windows 9x on a recent-ish Thinkpad? […]
Show full quote

Slightly less retro, but has anyone managed to put Windows 9x on a recent-ish Thinkpad?

Found an x200s in the "junk computer" section of a computer store here in Akamon-dori (think of it as a smaller Akihabara) for about 9000yen.
It POSTs, but there is no OS, and the condition tag just lists the rather shabby exterior casing and worn keyboard (no actual functional issues). There is also a stack of x61 and x60s (1 year older and 2 years older than the x200) for about 5000yen each in similar condition.
[...]

My only concern is drivers really...

Those are all Core 2 Duo generation, For Windows 9x I'd ideally go for a Pentium III or Pentium 4, maybe if you are lucky for a Pentium M.
Of course you can ignore the second core, and you can usually switch the SATA controller to legacy IDE emulation, but I don't think it will be easy if at all possible.
If you really want to try this I'd first try to find out which components exactly are inside the notebook and then try to find drivers for them (at least for the important components like video and sound, for gaming you could for example ignore stuff like ethernet or Wifi).

It's hard to find a laptop that is good for old DOS games and can run UT/Q2. For DOS games it's good to have a hardware volume knob (software volume change usually doesn't work under DOS on laptops) and a sound chip with good FM synthesis (Yamaha OP3-SAx, ESS ES1688). I have many old laptops and the best for this purpose are ThinkPad 760 and Toshiba Satellite Pro 440/460/480/490 (always look for "CDT" versions as they have active-matrix TFT LCDs instead of passive-matrix DSTN). These old Toshibas are better because they are still available in good condition.

For UT/Q2 you need at least S3 Savage/IX graphics (8 MB) which was in laptops from 1999-2000, even better is to look for ATI Mobility 128 (mobile Rage 128 Pro). Many laptops from that time doesn't have hardware volume knobs (Toshiba have) and most of them uses newer sound cards that has crippled FM synthesis (ESS Maestro 2/3) or doesn't have any (Yamaha AC/XG).

I'm can't remind any laptop that is suitable for both (DOS and UT/Q2).

----

ThinkPad X200s is too new. There is no way how to use its sound chip in DOS or Win9x.

PhaytalError wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Do any of those laptops stretch 320x200 games to fullscreen, or do they display 320x200 games letterboxed?

Good question, i'm not overly sure. I did some some digging around the web though, someone posted back in the day that the Toshiba Tecra 8000 has a display option in BIOS to strech so that 320x200 does full screen when he uses it to game, I have no way to confirm this though and it seems to be the only post in regards to the question at hand.

Other than that, I have no idea.

All mainstream mobile graphics chips from SVGA era (1992+) have a display stretch option. Only few laptops doesn't allow to use it and it's mostly a BIOS "problem". However it is based on doubling columns and lines of pixels so it looks ugly when you want to stretch 640x480 to 800x600/1024x768. Look here for the result:

http://notebookblog.cz/blog/wp-content/upload … book-xe3_11.jpg

ATI Rage LT Pro was the first chip with filtered LCD stretching and until 2005 only ATI and NVIDIA chips had it. Anyway, for 320x200 gaming I personally like a non-filtered stretching more.

------

LCD stretch in old Toshiba BIOSes:

http://notebookblog.cz/blog/wp-content/upload … dt-museum15.jpg
http://notebookblog.cz/blog/wp-content/upload … dt-museum14.jpg

Here you can see Toshiba 440CDT (800x600 TFT, Yamaha OPL3) running Doom2 (320x200):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlODEi4mTY

I had a Dell Latitude CP (CP-M233ST) that had a 233MHz Pentium MMX, NeoMagic video, and some random SBPro compatible audio chipset. Ran Win98SE flawlessly, especially after I maxed out the memory on it to 128MB. Mine had the larger 12" (iirc) 1024x768 and scaled video wiout a problem, even though it looked like utter crap. I believe this one played old DOS games pretty well.

Going a bit further back, I also had an IBM Thinkpad 760XD (166MHz Pentium MMX, 98MB RAM, larger display for 1024x768 resolution). If memory serves me, that one also played DOS games pretty well and scaled the screen.

The only thing that has kept me from using a laptop as a dos gaming rig is the lack of a gameport. The only recolection I have of a portable with a 15-pin gameport is some compydyne or micron laptop advertised in a Computer Shopper magazine (yes the ones that looked like phone books!). Does anyone have a real 15-pin gameport on their laptop that can work with dos games? I can't use usb controllers because usb to gameport doesnt work for dos but does of course work for windows games.

I am aware that there were PCMCIA adapters like this, but I think they are pretty rare...

I did find this link that may be an older website that seems to be selling something that might work:
http://www.synapseadaptive.com/augcom/gus/Joystick.htm