That's good to know. If only 486 laptops had the ET4000 series video. I have a 4000AX ISA and 4000/w32p VLB and those are wonderful cards for DOS.

So wait, the T4800CT has an ES688 or the Panasonic quad-speed PCMCIA CD-ROM with integrated sound?

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-07-20, 02:08:

That's good to know. If only 486 laptops had the ET4000 series video. I have a 4000AX ISA and 4000/w32p VLB and those are wonderful cards for DOS.

So wait, the T4800CT has an ES688 or the Panasonic quad-speed PCMCIA CD-ROM with integrated sound?

T4800CT - this implies no CDROM built-in, and only the Windows Sound System (if I remember correctly is defined as 2 chips - one for WAV (ESS688) and one for FM synthesis, and that FM synthesis is an OPL3 (YMF262) or an OPL3 clone. It can also be a one-chip solution like an ESS1688 with ESFM integrated)

If you plan to buy a Toshiba T-series for classic gaming and you need a CDROM drive, consider a T2150/2155CDT instead (practically the same but with a CDROM drive integrated, and a C&T 65545, which performs better than the WD). And that Tseng ET4000 will likely be rather power hungry.

I already have a PCMCIA external CD-ROM drive that I can use and hope it works since it never worked on my Satellite Pro 410CDT laptop since the CD drive for it broke.

But thanks for the information. Appreciate it, plus, it's hard to find a T2150CDT these days on eBay, but I'll keep searching.

My N600c is here! Worked for two hours and then died. Was blinking like crazy, looked like I was plugging and unplugging the charger. That was expected, the seller told me that the laptop had some charging port issues. Had to disassembly it completely to get my hands on charging port. And some weird guys say that modern laptops are hard to disassembly, 🤣!So the soldering between port and motherboard was dead, I renewed it. But the laptop still didn't boot up. As a last resort, i've reinserted ram, and surprisingly it started working again! Already tried few windows games (quake 3, thief ii, unreal) that wasn't working well on M1 from N400c, and here they work perfectly. Now I'm going to install win 98.

If anyone has this laptop and have a guide on how to enable native dos sound I would be appreciated to have it. Just to save some time. If such a thing doesn't exist I'll google myself 😀

I'm dealing with exactly the same problem atm (Compaq N600c: hangs on playing audio in DOS, music works)

I'll update the topic because I had it working for one boot yesterday. And then suddenly the I/O, IRQ and DMA combination didn't work anymore. Sigh.

From what I learned I need VXD driver instead of current WDM. Dunno where to get this for now.

I found one on this driver CD at Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/mmcd9v22

Should you get it working btw then I would very much like to get your ESSAUDIO.INI (which is created by the non-WDM drivers) and perhaps everything that Compaq Diagnostics (https://driverscollection.com/_44749461801219 … dows-98-XP-free) spits out 😀

Did you install this? ES1989 4CH\WIN9X I can't get it working. After reboot second generic device can't find its driver and I have no sound.

Yes, I had the same.

For the unknown device you can manually pick the ESS ES1989 PCI audio device from the list. Then it automatically installs a DOS emulation device, a gameport and then you should have sound.

When in doubt, the WDM driver set for the Latitude C600/Inspiron 4000 works as well.

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-07-24, 15:12:

Yes, I had the same.

For the unknown device you can manually pick the ESS ES1989 PCI audio device from the list. Then it automatically installs a DOS emulation device, a gameport and then you should have sound.

It’s not working well. Trash midi sound and some games won’t have sound even with proper settings.

I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong here. IRQ more than 7 is impossible to set here, I’m getting error.

You've got completely different IRQ/DMA settings than what my drivers gave me. Interesting.

I did make some progress and I now got sound to work reliably in Rise of the Triad, stuttering sound in Quake (edit 2: fixed 99% of stuttering) and no sound in Doom (edit: got sound working in Doom). I will update my topic about the sound issues later. I'm going to try some more things to hopefully improve the sound in Quake, at least.

But I am starting to doubt, after 6+ hours of trying to get it to work, that this notebook (or even this chipset?) is really suitable for DOS gaming 😜

HandOfFate wrote on 2020-07-25, 09:59:

You've got completely different IRQ/DMA settings than what my drivers gave me. Interesting.

I did make some progress and I now got sound to work reliably in Rise of the Triad, stuttering sound in Quake (edit 2: fixed 99% of stuttering) and no sound in Doom (edit: got sound working in Doom). I will update my topic about the sound issues later. I'm going to try some more things to hopefully improve the sound in Quake, at least.

But I am starting to doubt, after 6+ hours of trying to get it to work, that this notebook (or even this chipset?) is really suitable for DOS gaming 😜

Hmmm...the audio or the setup? Well, there are several issues here:

a) Tulatin is really too fast for the old DOS stuff, but not really great for the later WinXP stuff, so it's in that weird transition period between Win98 and XP. setmul can only give you limited magic here.
b) ESS Maestro 2/Allegro (really a Maestro 3) does not do all that great for FM (emulated).
c) Tulatin P3 is a weird little in-betweener - If you buy Tulatin mobile (2001), you might as well buy Banias Pentium-M (2003), which is a much better Tulatin derived core but better clock control, faster FSB and USB2 support. Of course, I am not sure if there are ANY pre-AC97 Pentium-Ms out there.
d) Same goes for the Radeon M6 - its better than the Rage 128 Mobility or the S3 Savage Mobiles, but it's not great against the Geforce2Gos (came out around the same time) and beyond.

So yes, the n600c is the "ultimate" DOS laptop out there (in terms of fastest CPU and most performant mobile GPU), but I would not say the best.

You can try out my hardware speed control program CPUSPD if you're interested in playing old DOS games which the N600C CPU is too fast to run. It's not tested on this system but since the PIII mobile has enhanced speedstep and the south bridge is ICH3-M, I think it should work fine under DOS/Win9x/Win Me.

ragefury32 wrote on 2020-07-28, 04:07:

So yes, the n600c is the "ultimate" DOS laptop out there (in terms of fastest CPU and most performant mobile GPU), but I would not say the best.

I also have Dell Inspiron 8100 and it has mostly the same specs including ESS Maestro, but the GPU is Radeon 9000 which is superior to everything else mentioned here (it's pretty rare version, usually came with GF2, GF4). But it's big and heavy... it also has PCI dock so you can install Solo1 and even maybe Voodoo.

Dell Precision M60 or Inspiron 8600 is also nice as a bridge between old and modern systems. It has lots of legacy connectors (irda, pcmcia, lpt, com, TV, usb, firewire, LAN), possibility to install floppy in a bay. Docking station you can usually get for free on scrap or for 1EUR at most which has DVI, all mentioned ports and PS/2 ports. There is also PCI dock. It has Pentium M up to 2.2 GHz so you can run modern OS, Radeon 9600 Pro (in best version), unfortunately no DOS audio (it's Sigmatel c-major, maybe there is some legacy emulation but I don't know). LCD screen up to 1900x1200. With PCI dock in theory you could install ESS Solo 1 and floppy drive in additional bay...

Does the sound work in DOS with the Inspiron 8100?

Honestly I didn't even try it because i use it only with Windows 98 and XP. I expect that there may be the same problems as with N600c, but i will try later and report.

That would be great, thanks 😀