The screens suck. Even the most expensive ones would be painful to look at today.

Yes, I agree. But there is always VGA out.

I have an AST 700N:
486SX33
8MB RAM
170MB HDD
greyscale 12" DSTN iirc
PC speaker
3.5" 1.44MB floppy drive

I'm only using it to test pcmcia sound cards nowadays...finding the 16MB ram upgrade is impossible 🙁

As a DOS machine, a 486 laptop would be great. Try an old Thinkpad 300 or 700 series. Lenovo has plenty of legacy drivers available for download. I like the 755C:

Intel 486 DX4-75
4MB RAM (32 max)
540MB HDD
Vesa 2.0 video 1MB

I don't think the screen on a Tecra is too bad.

I consider 25ms a good shout for maximal response times. That's the number my 15" TFT is billed at. No visible smearing in 3D games but still not quite perfect for side scrollers with lots of recurring patterns in the background.

Now an interesting somewhat off-topic tidbit is that the PSP actually had a 100ms display because they went ultra cheap. Colors like red and black smear quite a bit on this thing.

Another problem is the graphics chips don't have scaling algorithms until Rage 128. They either run 1:1, meaning a little image in the center of the LCD at 320x200, or do a horrible pixel stretch (it can often be toggled).

486 and Pentium laptops were often natively 800x600. Some games can be run at that but the CPU won't cope well. Nor would the undoubtedly weak graphics chip you'd have. I've found with that resolution you need a PIII to get good fluidity with many games.

And many notebooks had poor VESA VBE compatibility, but UNIVBE might save the day there.

I had this awesome little 486 laptop. I think it was a Compaq Contura 410cx. It used a 486DX2 @ 50mhz and had a 640x480 color screen that was just incredible. In comparison to my later Compaq Armada 1571dm which had a terribly slow screen, the Contura was crystal clear with fast screen response. The 640x480 screen scaled up any 320x240 or 320x200 games by 2 so there weren't any problems with that. The only problem was that it only had pc speaker.

The ThinkPad 755CD is a nice little retro laptop that comes in 486 and Pentium flavors. It has an active-matrix screen so games look quite good, it has a built-in CD-ROM, and it has Sound Blaster compatible audio with stereo speakers and a joystick/MIDI port. Probably one of the most versatile vintage laptops for Windows 3.1 and MS-DOS gaming.

Not exactly retro but I had a Toshiba P3, one of the first Mobile P3 in fact, which had an astonishingly clear screen with a very good color balance. True, the resolution was abysmal by today's standards and the viewing angle was horrible but it was the first PC I carried around in which I could play those first DivX;-) movies and I was all like "Wooo, nothing can be better than this". I think the video card was even an nVidia GeForce MX. Nice machine, but burned out pretty soon.

And yes, pretty much any screen up until the P2/P3 era would be really uncomfortable to look at it today.

Laptops for gaming or for use as desktop replacements didn't really become common until the P4-Athlon 64 era. The only real drawback to them is that even though they will play most of your games with at least medium settings, is that you only get like 2 hours battery life. My emachines M6911 was an Athlon 64 3400+ with Mobility Radeon 9600 video and a 15.4" screen with 1280x960 resolution and unplugged battery life was really bad and it got really hot to the point of making my legs sweat and leaving big red spots on my thighs. Sitting on the desk with a monitor plugged into the VGA port and a USB mouse and keyboard wasn't bad. I didn't even have a desktop machine at that time. It was expensive, though. It was $1499 which was more than I ever spent on any computer desktop or laptop.

I don't anyone has any unreasonable expectations of the battery life of a 15-year-old laptop. The main advantages are portability and convenience. The average person doesn't have a whole room to dedicate to a hobby, so a sprawling desktop with components littering the floor is out of the question.

And so comes the requisite Dosbox suggestion.

If one really wants to try to find a nice old notebook, I suggest going to the CGW Museum and looking up the issues with the notebook roundups they did. You can quickly learn all of the issues involved with gaming on those old machines. And then factor in what a 15 year old CCFL probably looks like.

I like these old laptops that didn't even come with a battery like the Toshiba T3200 and similar ones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETr3ATCYetk

fronzel wrote:

I like these old laptops that didn't even come with a battery like the Toshiba T3200 and similar ones.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETr3ATCYetk

I put a SCSI card, and a Sound Blaster 1.5 w/CMS in mine!