Late 90s definitely!

I remember seeing many Pentium notebooks, MMX with Sound Blaster Pro compatible chips at that time.

Even tiny ones from Sony that put a netbook to shame 😀

Don't ask me about model numbers however. Wouldn't have a clue...

But notebooks always had good hardware available to them. Thinkpads with workstation chips and all of that.

I was thinking more late 90s as well, though I wasn't sure if there were any Pentium II notebooks with Soundblaster support. I think it would be really sweet to be able to run UT 99 and Quake 2 as well, even just in software mode.

That means 3D video chips.

Rules out 3DFX because AFIK they didn't do anything mobile.

Look for notebooks with ATI Radeon mobility.

But are there any laptops with Radeon Mobility graphics which also offer Soundblaster support? The latter is much more important to me than the former.

We had a Pentium 133 Thinkpad. S3 Trio graphics. Perfect for most stuff you mentioned, but unfortunately no Quake 2 or Unreal.

m1so wrote:

We had a Pentium 133 Thinkpad. S3 Trio graphics. Perfect for most stuff you mentioned, but unfortunately no Quake 2 or Unreal.

I would be fine with that. I understand that laptops didn't really have decent 3D acceleration until much later on, so something like that would probably work.

I wonder, how would something like this work? http://www.ebay.ca/itm/IBM-Thinkpad-600E-Lapt … =item1c37b86d86
You can find more information about it here http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:600E
It sounds decent, aside from the NeoMagic graphics adapter which I have never heard of. Does anyone have experience with those? Would one provide decent 2D acceleration and/or VESA? I'm fairly certain 3D is a no-go. 🤣

Or what about this? http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Dell-Latitude-CPi-R400 … =item1c3706c80b
Or this http://www.ebay.ca/itm/Compaq-Armada-7400-Lap … =item53ef0e6b59

Careful with Sound Blaster compatibility. Many work well from within Windows, but not from MS-DOS mode.

A standard Pentium MMX notebook maybe?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Careful with Sound Blaster compatibility. Many work well from within Windows, but not from MS-DOS mode.

A standard Pentium MMX notebook maybe?

True, but how many mid-late 90s DOS games are there which have problems running from Windows? In my experience, the ones that tend to have problems were all released before Win95.

Another thing, I'm trying to balance compatibility with performance, and that's sort of a tough thing to do. xD Because along with like Duke3D and WarCraft II, I also want to be able to run more demanding games like Carmageddon and the previously mentioned UT and Quake 2, even if I have to run them in software mode at 320x200.

You'll get SBPro compatibility at best on most laptops with a CS4232 or a ESS1688 anyway. The screen scaling will vary and most won't do 320x200 so well scaled up...

It's very trial and error - especially good luck finding an old laptop that's still alive with a working (and replacable) battery and a clean screen. 😀

leileilol wrote:

You'll get SBPro compatibility at best on most laptops with a CS4232 or a ESS1688 anyway. The screen scaling will vary and most won't do 320x200 so well scaled up...

It's very trial and error - especially good luck finding an old laptop that's still alive with a working (and replacable) battery and a clean screen. 😀

Having a working battery doesn't really matter to me so much, same with having a clean screen since I can easily take care of a dirty screen using a damp cloth. Mainly, I'm just looking into the idea of snagging an older laptop so that I can have a way of playing older games on period hardware without using up too much space.

By any chance, would you know which video chipsets I should look for, in terms of compatibility with lower resolutions?

Low res dos gaming might be a problem but that depends on the lcd panel. I got a Thinkpad 600 that is great and very enjoyable gaming wise. Good speakers and a very clear lcd, as for the battery one can take a dive and rebuild the battery pack them selves but they absolutely must have the right cell type to replace the old cells. The good news is that at least some of the packs are lithium ion. Keep this in mind if the battery for the cmos is dead in these thinkpads you will get a cpu fan error.

nforce4max wrote:

Low res dos gaming might be a problem but that depends on the lcd panel. I got a Thinkpad 600 that is great and very enjoyable gaming wise. Good speakers and a very clear lcd, as for the battery one can take a dive and rebuild the battery pack them selves but they absolutely must have the right cell type to replace the old cells. The good news is that at least some of the packs are lithium ion. Keep this in mind if the battery for the cmos is dead in these thinkpads you will get a cpu fan error.

I was actually just looking at one of those earlier on. How well does it support DOS sound and resolutions?

The gpu is by Neomagic and it does have very decent dos support but can't say for which games that may not work. It is worth the expense if you can find one of these machines cheap and in decent shape.

It would be hard to find these days, but a Toshiba Libretto 70CT would make a great DOS gaming laptop!
Insanely compact formfactor, yet still comfortable.
120MHz Pentium MMX, 32MB EDO RAM.
For video, an SVGA/VESA 1MB Chips and Technologies F65550. UniVBE/SciTech Display Doctor supports this!
And for audio, although I cannot find the name of the actual chip (Creative didn't make hardware for mobile/embedded systems, did they?), its a SB Pro v.3.01 compatible with an actual Yamaha OPL3-SA3 FM chip.

It would be excellent. Could do the later Build engine games and Quake even!

Also, this may not be what you're looking for but its somewhat related, the handheld GCW Zero has DOSBox and SCUMMVM ported to it. Brilliant control layout and an actual 4:3 screen!

swampfox wrote:

Chips and Technologies F65550. UniVBE/SciTech Display Doctor supports this!

Careful. Even though it does take advantage of linear frame buffer (and be faster by 1.8 times according to SDD's benchmarks) it will fuzz out the screen when initializing certain modes, such as text. It's damn trippy to witness it though but it freezes the system when it BSODs and you can't read it 🙁

CS4232 on that IIRC. Real OPL3, but has problems with certain games like X-Wing (which won't work without a joystick anyway).

swampfox wrote:

It would be hard to find these days, but a Toshiba Libretto 70CT would make a great DOS gaming laptop! Insanely compact formfact […]
Show full quote

It would be hard to find these days, but a Toshiba Libretto 70CT would make a great DOS gaming laptop!
Insanely compact formfactor, yet still comfortable.
120MHz Pentium MMX, 32MB EDO RAM.
For video, an SVGA/VESA 1MB Chips and Technologies F65550. UniVBE/SciTech Display Doctor supports this!
And for audio, although I cannot find the name of the actual chip (Creative didn't make hardware for mobile/embedded systems, did they?), its a SB Pro v.3.01 compatible with an actual Yamaha OPL3-SA3 FM chip.

It would be excellent. Could do the later Build engine games and Quake even!

Also, this may not be what you're looking for but its somewhat related, the handheld GCW Zero has DOSBox and SCUMMVM ported to it. Brilliant control layout and an actual 4:3 screen!

I think that would work well, actually. Granted, it probably wouldn't quite be powerful enough for Quake II or Unreal, but it would work fine for everything else.

I have a Dell laptop (made in Japan) stashed away in the attic somewhere. Pentium 133MHz, 24MB, ESS sound, Neomagic graphics, 800x600 panel, long travel keys, trackball. Don't know the exact model numbers, have to check that.

The BIOS has a "compatibiliy mode" option which instantly turns it into an XT or so. At least that's what it feels like, have yet to run speedsys on it. Cool thing is that you can jump right into the BIOS options with an Fn-key combination, even from within Windows!
The ESS card has OK SBPro2 compatibility and funky ESFM music. Nothing wrong with that. The NeoMagic graphics chipset is shit. In graphics modes it scales OK though it's not centered horizontally, but in text mode it will only scale vertically, and it has the ugliest text mode font ever.

I wouldn't worry about 2D acceleration, I think PCI/AGP chips are not too bad here.
I still have an old laptop (OEM version of Twinhead Slimnote EX2) which came with a PII-233.
It has an ESS 1688 sound chip so that should be OK. (Didn't test it.)
Video is Trident Cyber 9397. Not actually bad, even has some basic Direct3D support in Windows 9x and drivers for Win31 and NT 4.0 (no OpenGL).
Scaling is bad, though - it can either don't scale at all or scale to full screen (1024x768) without any interpolation which means that not all pixels end up at the same size and the screen looks somewhat distorted.

AFAIK Rage Pro based notebooks can do proper interpolated scaling. ViRGE MX might be OK too, but I'm note sure about that. Or just use an external screen, the laptop still saves on space when not in use.
You should probably research which audio chip was used in the different models and that check for DOS compatibility.
For Dell Notebooks you could look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dell_Latitude#C-Family
Their C-Models seem to use ESS Maestro 3i or Cirrus Logic CS4205.

From ATI, I think you need at least Rage 128 for proper resolution scaling. It was a hyped feature of the chip. I'm not sure if any contemporary competitors did it.