keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-24, 22:47:
[*]Sound: Anything fully SB compatible, preferably SB16. Many people would want wavetable in addition to OPL3. Good choices are various ESS cards, Yamaha YMF or OPL3SAx series.
Personally I'd much rather have something like an ESS Solo 1 with DDMA on the PCI bus than "SB16." Internal wavetable and hardware external MIDI-out would be killer (via 15-pin "game" port or dedicated MIDI ports - you can even use something like Arturia's 3.5mm MIDI dongle spec to save space.)
I know it's supposed to be "DOS/Win9x", but if it's leaning more towards the Win9x side of things (PIII, etc.) then something with proper A3D or EAX would be really neat.
keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-01-24, 22:47:[*]Screen: 1024x768 with good and easily adjustable scaling options for low-res games.
1280x800 or 1280x960 would make much more sense than 1024x768. You can evenly upscale 320x... or 640x... modes without resorting to interpolation. Plus it's nicer to have the extra resolution for Win9x use. (And yes, I would want the option to upscale 320x200 to 1280x800 without forcing a 4:3 aspect ratio.) Since we're wishlisting, an in-depth software control panel for the upscaler would be sweet. 1600x1*00 would give ultimate flexibility, but that gets a little squinty unless it's a pretty big laptop.
A few other ideas: robust USB 'legacy' implimentation in the BIOS. It'd be nice to have the option to present USB keyboards & mice as PS/2, flash drives as internal HDDs, USB gamepads or joysticks as if on a "virtual" gameport, etc.
One or two accessible Mini-PCI slots with "tidy" external breakout dongles available, or even a PCI(+ISA?) dock in a nice form factor like the ones for mid-2000 Dell Latitudes.
3D acceleration: Radeon 7000/9000 Mobility chips are very good. IMHO better than anything Nvidia released for laptops (that wasn't a power hog or space heater.) Of course onboard Voodoo3 would be sweet, and yes, there are stocks of NOS VSA-100 chips on Ebay, but they're not low-power or particularly cool-running either. 32MB+ dedicated VRAM.
Most of these features already exist in some laptops, just not all of them in the same one.
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