VOGONS


First post, by henryVK

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Hello friends and neighbours,

I have the option of buying a Thinkpad 380XD in pretty good condition. The machine would make a decent "slightly faster" dos gaming machine. However, since it has a 800x600 screen and I don't want to play lower res games with black borders, I'm wondering about the "screen expansion" capability. Information on this kind of thing is scant, so I only know that it <i>does</i> in fact have some kind of stretching, activated via FN+F8.

Does anyone have a 380 or similar model, and, if so, is this any good or should I look elsewhere?

Thanks and all the best,

Henry

Edit: actually, I just realised that some of the 380XD's don't have a TFT, but rather a HAP passive screen... is there any surefire way to differentiate?

Reply 1 of 6, by Intel486dx33

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I have an IBM 380.
They are very durable and easy to fix.
I like the fat keys on the keyboard and track pad levers and red ball pointer.

It uses
NeoMagic graphics
Crystal audio
17mm IBM travel star hard-drive 42,000 rpm.
up to 42mb memory up-gradable. Sodimm in very cheap today. You can purchase a 32mb sodimm for about $10 on eBay.
The battery will most likely be dead so you can replace or repair.
Also if you get boot screen error's it's most likely a dead CMOS battery. So the first thing you should do is replace the CMOS battery.

IBM provides support for DOS/Win3x/WinNT351/WinNT40/Win98/OS2 on this laptop.
https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad-Driver … t/ddfm/380.html

As for external display the graphics are not going to be that great. As it uses the neomagic graphics chip.

For networking I use a PCMCIA card 3com 3c509x
Works with PS/2 optical mouse too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWGOLO5HTDs&t=1138s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD9axfmUNqs

Reply 2 of 6, by henryVK

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Okay, thanks for your input and the specs, even though you didn't really answer my initial question 😉

After some research I think I'm better off with a Thinkpad 770, since all models have TFTs and appear to scale 320x2** and 640x480 to near fullscreen.

Reply 3 of 6, by dosgamer

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Pretty much any old laptop will do the screen expansion. Problem is, it always looks like garbage. The interpolation algorithms were never good. That only changed with the later Thinkpads, like the T30/T40 (ATI had developed a special algorithm for the Radeon that actually looked decent). Those are actually a good choice for retrogaming since they run Win98SE and you can still use DOSBox for the older games.

Coppermine Celeron 800 @ 1.12GHz (8x140) - Asus P2B Rev. 1.12 - 256MB PC133 CL2 - Voodoo5 5500 AGP - SB AWE64 CT4520 - Roland SCC-1 - Intel Pro/1000GT - 1.44MB Floppy - ATAPI ZIP 100 - 120GB IDE - DVD-ROM - DVD-R/RW/RAM - Win98SE

Reply 5 of 6, by henryVK

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Right-O, that's the kind of info I need. In only have one laptop that has "screen stretch". It's a Libretto 100CT, which has a screwy native resolution of 800x480, so "stretch" is seriously weird because everything is stretched into cinemascope, so to speak.

Anyhow, my other laptop (PCD-4ND) has a 640x480 screen but stretches 320x2** to fullscreen. There is some distortion, but I think it's pretty decent:

s-l1000.jpg