1) Dos 7.1 is mostly fine. Some installers might cause issues with FAT32 (my Tie fighter disk version seems to decompress wrongly or incomplete) but once you get a game on it it should work as long as the game is fine with the hardware (I'll come back to this) Multi booting DOS 6.22 is not really necessary

2) Some manufacturers put in arbitrary limits but generally I would assume 32GB as the limit. That limit is a hardware limit. There might be bios updates to fix that but I have no idea if there is one for this machine.

3) partitioning can be done from the setup disks. HOWEVER, the fdsik version that comes standard with windows 98 has problems with HDDs above 64GB. If you have to partition them, I would use a win2k or XP disk.

4) 20GB should be fine for now, but if you want and can go bigger, I would consider CF to IDE instead of SD. SD cards are more "fragile" and in my experience slower when used as an OS drive.

5) depends what you want to do. I don't have a standard set of applications for such old systems, just What I feel like at a time.

6) Theoretically a good idea, practically, good luck finding any that still works. Do everyone a favor and keep it off the internet.

7) Wing commander 1&2, Ultima 6 and the underworld games won't really work. Slowing down a PIII to a degree that they are playable will depend on BIOS options that in my experience will be unavailable on a notebook. Some slodown software might work, but I'm not certain. Ultima 8 has the best chance of working. Your examples are from Origin and origin is pretty well known for games that are speed critical. Most Dos games from the mid 90s should work reasonably well though.

8) Pretty much anything that runs on windows 95 will also run on 98, and most games up until the mid 2000s tend to run on win98 as well. However, mobile GPUs of that time are a bit anemic, I would suspect cutoff for games that run playable will be around 2001-2002.

GOG is a bit of an odd one. Adventure games likely will not work, since most of them use ScummVM and don't include executables.

Dos games are the easiest ones to get to run, just copy the right files?folder structure and run the executables under dos. Some dos games even come with disk images and audio tracks as ogg files. Once you found them, you can burn them on cd and they should work. There might be the occasional issue with copy protection, but I have not run into one yet. The images are usually caled GAME.GOG or similar. If they don't have seperate audio tracks they tend to be simple ISO files. If they do have audio tracks, they are IN files and the corresponding cue sheets are called, well GAME.CUE or similar. That's how I figured that out in the first place. Games with multiple disks are generally named gamea.gog, gameb.gog, etc.

Windows games are more difficult as the installers won't work under windows 98 out of the box. Some people like phillscomputerlab have made guides like https://www.philscomputerlab.com/installing-g … s-on-95-98.html. There are other ways IIRC, but none of them are trivial and also depend on how cooperative a game installation will be.

9) be patient and get used to frustration. Old hardware and software is not exactly userfriendly these days and you WILL run into issues.

//EDIT I forgot one major thing, Sound drivers for DOS are really mixed bag. Depending on what soundchip is used dos compatibility can be really spotty and frustrating. At times it can be useful to run dos games directly from windows 98 if sound causes issues. However, compatibility will be quite spotty in these circumstances.

If I remember correctly, you lose sound blaster compatibility with T23 because it has different sound chip than t20,t21 or ,t22, so t22 is the last one that has working dos sound driver. You could always buy one of those opl3ltp to get music in dos if you wanted though. In my opinion though the sound chip makes it more of a windows retro pc. You can make it slow enough to play speed sensitive games like wing commander by using bios options to slow it down and then disabling L1 cache like I did with my T21. Those thinkpads have good selection of bios options.

Koltoroc wrote:

1) Dos 7.1 is mostly fine. Some installers might cause issues with FAT32 (my Tie fighter disk version seems to decompress wrongly or incomplete) but once you get a game on it it should work as long as the game is fine with the hardware (I'll come back to this) Multi booting DOS 6.22 is not really necessary].

Win98 DOS is not "mostly fine", it's "just fine". FAT32-related errors can be mitigated by dedicating a FAT16 partition on the drive for specific games. I agree with your conclusion that dual-booting DOS 6.22 is not necessary.

Koltoroc wrote:

2) Some manufacturers put in arbitrary limits but generally I would assume 32GB as the limit. That limit is a hardware limit. There might be bios updates to fix that but I have no idea if there is one for this machine.

There is no limit for the T23 that I know of. These machines left the factory with disks as large as 40GB, but some were upgraded by users to 160GB (and likely larger than that). See for example.

Koltoroc wrote:

3) partitioning can be done from the setup disks. HOWEVER, the fdsik version that comes standard with windows 98 has problems with HDDs above 64GB. If you have to partition them, I would use a win2k or XP disk.

Not sure about this, because I have an 80GB drive in my Win98 SE system, and don't recall any problems partitioning it; then again, none of the partitions is larger than 64GB on that drive.

2K/XP have a different, documented problem - they will not let you create FAT32 partitions >32GB (definitely applies to the OS tools, not sure if to the install CDs as well, but probably).

Koltoroc wrote:

4) 20GB should be fine for now, but if you want and can go bigger, I would consider CF to IDE instead of SD. SD cards are more "fragile" and in my experience slower when used as an OS drive.

Yep, SD sucks for random access. CF is much better. An actual IDE drive wouldn't be bad as well, although good luck finding an unused one...

Koltoroc wrote:

//EDIT I forgot one major thing, Sound drivers for DOS are really mixed bag. Depending on what soundchip is used dos compatibility can be really spotty and frustrating. At times it can be useful to run dos games directly from windows 98 if sound causes issues. However, compatibility will be quite spotty in these circumstances.

Yep, you are exactly right. The IBM documentation mentions that the chip on this laptop (CS4299) is SB-compatible, but in practice, it appears not to be the case. 🙁

So, as was already said - not a good laptop for DOS retro-gaming; early Windows retro-gaming - sure!

2) P3 era should be around the 160GB physical limit which is hardware limit. You can get software to get around this but really 160GB is huge for Win98

3) The original Fdisk has a bug at 64gb, but you can either download MS's updated fdisk (263044usa8.exe) or places like bootdisk.com have a boot disk with the up to date fidsk already included.

5) Win98 + drivers, Direct X (version depends on what games your after) as bare minimum. zip program and virtual cd drive of your choice will make like easier as well. Anything else to satisfy your nostalgic desires.

6) I wouldn't even bother with updates, a fully patched Win98 is still not secure, just don't use it for browsing and if your really paranoid keep it off the network unless copying files and you'll be fine.

Sound in pure dos mode may not be an option but you may get away with playing dos games from within windows.

For the Win9x updates, I use the Feb 2004 update CD which should have all the official updates you need.
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?file … =873&menustate=

The only other thing I would add is NUSB which will give you USB storage capabilities (thumb drives, etc.)

The Unofficial Win98SE service packs tend to cause more issues than they help... as in, I refuse to use it anymore since it completely screws up a lot of stuff.

i have a T22
but i don´t like it for retro games

it has win98 but the soundcard in it does not have a DOS driver
also the resolution of the screen is huge, i don´t know why they released a laptop with such a huge resouliton of 1400 x 1050

i do like other laptops, more from the pentiu,1 era like a toshiba satellite.

chinny22 wrote:

6) I wouldn't even bother with updates, a fully patched Win98 is still not secure, just don't use it for browsing and if your really paranoid keep it off the network unless copying files and you'll be fine.

I don't think web security is an issue at all for Win9x. It's so much incompatible with anything modern, that the chances of it being compatible with any malware is almost infinitesimal. It's just that neither the OS core nor the newest available browsers are satisfactory for browsing the modern web.

SETBLASTER wrote:

also the resolution of the screen is huge, i don´t know why they released a laptop with such a huge resouliton of 1400 x 1050

To have more 'real estate' for productivity applications.

SETBLASTER wrote:

i have a T22 but i don´t like it for retro games […]
Show full quote

i have a T22
but i don´t like it for retro games

it has win98 but the soundcard in it does not have a DOS driver
also the resolution of the screen is huge, i don´t know why they released a laptop with such a huge resouliton of 1400 x 1050

i do like other laptops, more from the pentiu,1 era like a toshiba satellite.

I have a T22 and I have dos sound driver installed. Compatibility is good in that way that it works in almost all the dos games because it uses PC/PCI but music doesn't sound correct in some games, but I still think it is better than a pc speaker.

Baoran wrote:

I have a T22 and I have dos sound driver installed. Compatibility is good in that way that it works in almost all the dos games because it uses PC/PCI but music doesn't sound correct in some games, but I still think it is better than a pc speaker.

Indeed! the T22 uses the same sound chip that the A2x series has, and it does have a DOS driver, which is surprisingly difficult to find, but actually works surprisingly well. Pay attention that in many games setting the music to 'Adlib' makes it sound correct, whereas 'Sound Blaster' sounds wrong. Unfortunately, the General MIDI option does not work in DOS (but it does work in Windows 9x!)

I have a write-up on it with some music samples:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/crystal … ndfusion-dos-fm

You were right to mention in your earlier post that T23 breaks this DOS compatibility by switching to a different chipset and audio chip. With how similar the T2x series are in other respects, most folks would miss that distinction. 🙁