I can confirm that the system works great without the main LiOn battery installed. Haven't had any problems at all and managed to get it cobbled up with a newer (slimmer) 20GB laptop drive I had laying around, installed Windows 98SE, and its working great.

In fact, it played some crazy music when the Windows "first run" screen popped up... I can't honestly remember the last time I heard this music, and I've set up 98SE over a hundred times over the years. So, that was cool.

The screen is surprisingly crisp.

Now, I need to figure out the simplest way to replace the RTC battery, because it doesn't keep the CMOS settings when its unplugged.

One of the coolest things I've ever seen on a computer though, is what I just discovered. The Crystal sound card can be configured in the BIOS! It actually lets you change WSS I/O Address, SBPro I/O, Synth I/O is always 388h, WSS&SBPro IRQ (configured together), WSS and SBPro IN\OUT DMA. This is super cool. With a fresh Win98SE install I can boot to the command prompt (with only set blaster in the autoexec) and play Descent with SBPro stereo sound and OPL3 music! It works great! I can't quite tell if its a real OPL3 or not but it sounds quite close to me... but its tough hearing it through little laptop speakers vs what I use on my desktop.

Has anyone ever replaced the RTC battery in a system like this?

I haven't dug into it yet, but I guess it uses a 3.6v NiMH battery... not sure if one of these would work... I can always harvest the old plug:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Ni-MH-40mAh-3-6V- … xUAAOSwyQtVlfzI

The manual also mentions a "backup battery" with the same specs. Not sure if that needs replaced too.

Cool! 😎

I haven't replaced a battery in such a system yet , but I have the same CF to 44pin adapter I think.

The adapter itself *works* in my Compaq Contura in the sense that the CF card is beeing detected and is showing the right drive geometry.
However, there seems to be a software issue here in my case, because it doesn't boot from it (FDISK is working fine, though).

So I can'te give you any tips in this regard, except maybe to be careful with the adaptor itself:
In my case, the CF card had to be inserted with the face down (inside) so that you couldn't see the card when you closed the trap door.

But that's probably different on every model (incl. Compaq laptops), so better be careful (make photos from the old HDD inside) and
look for a little arrow or triangle on the adapter. It should mark the location for pin 1 (speaking under correction).

Well, everything seems to work great on this thing, even the CDROM now.

Problem is, it doesn't scale anything but text modes beyond a small window in the center of the screen and the display is a surprisingly high 1024x768 native resolution, so DOS games are pretty small. That's really too bad, because its a pretty cool system otherwise. It looks like it DOES scale really low resolution stuff to maybe 640x480, but that's it. Also, the FM music is definitely not a real OPL3... it was pretty obvious after hooking it up to a set of real speakers.

Is there anything I might be missing here? The BIOS simply has an option for scaling text modes, and I don't see any keys on the keyboard that would toggle scaling. From what I understand this isn't really unusual. There's probably no way to force it to stretch things beyond 640x480 since it can't easily double it again.

According to this: http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticCont … omTOCLink=false
There should be a real YMF262 in there.

Also, check the BIOS settings. There should be a "screen stretch" option or something like that.

keenmaster486 wrote:

According to this: http://support.toshiba.com/support/staticCont … omTOCLink=false
There should be a real YMF262 in there.

Also, check the BIOS settings. There should be a "screen stretch" option or something like that.

Interesting. It definitely doesn't sound like the OPL3 I've heard on a couple different cards.

As mentioned, the BIOS only has an option for text mode scaling. Everything else only seems to scale up to a 640x480 window with black borders.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

As mentioned, the BIOS only has an option for text mode scaling. Everything else only seems to scale up to a 640x480 window with black borders.

Oh, I see. Sorry. I have a similar model that also scales graphics modes, so I just made that assumption 🤣

It is OPL3. it just doesn't sound equalized like a typical creative card.

There is a screen stretching TSR for the Toshiba laptops with CT65550 chips. I'll attach it here. It will stretch your 320x200 games with nearest neighbor resampling to most of the screen

Also it benefits from Scitech Display Doctor / UniVBE in DOS to enable linear buffer in VESA so you might want to use that for extra performance (but not for the windows driver)

To play Windows games faster on it, is to install Windows 2000 as it has a more mature, faster, stable CT65k driver 😜

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Now, I need to figure out the simplest way to replace the RTC battery, because it doesn't keep the CMOS settings when its unplugged.

If/when you figure out how, I hope you'll let us know. I need to change my 440CDX's RTC battery and I assume it and the 720CDT are similar in this respect.

My theory is that it's under the keyboard.

leileilol wrote:

It is OPL3. it just doesn't sound equalized like a typical creative card. […]
Show full quote

It is OPL3. it just doesn't sound equalized like a typical creative card.

There is a screen stretching TSR for the Toshiba laptops with CT65550 chips. I'll attach it here. It will stretch your 320x200 games with nearest neighbor resampling to most of the screen

Also it benefits from Scitech Display Doctor / UniVBE in DOS to enable linear buffer in VESA so you might want to use that for extra performance (but not for the windows driver)

To play Windows games faster on it, is to install Windows 2000 as it has a more mature, faster, stable CT65k driver 😜

Wow, thanks!

I'm not familiar with SciTech Display Doctor or UniVBE. Are you saying that they'll help with performance when using the scaling TSR or in general with this CT5k? Is there likely to be a large performance hit when using scaling?

As for the OPL3, I hear completely different effects than I have heard with my ct2940 (opl3 model), ymf718 and other non-creative cards . If it is just an equalization thing, it's certainly quite pronounced. I'll try to get a recording of it.

Okay, I installed UniVBE 6.7 (DOS Only) and the vexp13 scaling TSR and it works great! I just played Descent and it was buttery smooth and filled most of the screen. The scaling is also surprisingly sharp... no loss in clarity from what I could tell.

Thanks so much leileilol! You've saved this poor machine from being stuffed in a box and forgotten yet again. It is now more likely to be used to play old games now that the games aren't relegated to a small tablet-sized window. I could easily set this up for use as a semi-portable DOS\9x gaming system if I want to show someone an authentic DOS gaming experience without having to expose them to the madness of my office\shop\laboratory\home. I could even bring along my Roland SC7 and a short aux cable and have it feed back into the Tecra's line-in for playback of GM music. Pretty cool. 😀

Just last week this thing was sitting in a heap of JUNK in a shed for 10-15 years. There were 3 old towers with it, of varying ages. A K6-2 400, Celeron 533 and a P4 1.8a... all in horrible, HORRIBLE condition. They were covered in mud, rusty, their covers had been removed (but were included), had green corrosion (from dripping water most likely) on the motherboards that had spread to the memory and up the IDE cables, they had cat hair stuck in them... they were disgusting. This laptop's power brick and floppy drive were in a sealed freezer bag, along with some other misc cables. The laptop itself had some mud on the top and had obviously not been babied, but it didn't look too bad considering the condition of the others. A friend of a relative gave them to me in trade for getting the data off of one of the drives for him. I stripped a few things out of the towers (CPUs and coolers, some drives... that's it) and dumped the nasty remains at the curb with disappointment (scappers snatched them up within a few hours)... but decided to see what this laptop was all about. Two days later I now have a working DOS gaming laptop that is only a game\midi port away from being competition for my two huge DOS gaming desktops.

This was a great find, for sure. 😀

Okay, now, time for some good stuff! I ran most of Phil's DOS Benchmark suite on this system. I also ran it with and without the display scaling TSR. All tests were run with UniVBE 6.70 loaded, after starting Windows 98SE with command prompt only. Results without the scaling TSR are in parenthesis.

3DBench 1.0c = 93.9 (same)
Chris3D VGA = 115 / 69fps (115.1 / 69fps)
Chris3D SVGA = 23.3 / 13.9fps (same)
PCP VGA = 30.4
PCP SVGA = 6.5 (same)
Doom TD = 1970 Realtics (1968 Realtics)
Quake TD VGA = 28.9fps
Quake TD 360x480 = 12.8fps (12.9fps)
System Info CPU Speed = 421.3
Landmark: CPU = 1066.9 ; FPU = 2762.6 ; Video = 4028.9
Top Bench = 61
Speedsys: CPU = 98.59 ; L1 Cache = 246.2 ; L2 = 99.55 ; Memory = 64.99

To my astonishment, scaling makes no real difference in performance at all. The largest difference was .1fps higher Quake 360x480 and Chris3D VGA, and actually a teeny tiny bit slower in Doom Timedemo without scaling (margin of error IMO). Also worth noting, all of the benchmarks ran flawlessly. No glitches or bugs at all with or without scaling.

All in all, I'm highly impressed. For the difference that scaling makes with regard to usability, and the fact that it was a 3rd party software solution, I can't believe it doesn't add any additional load on the system under DOS.

I'm also impressed with the performance of this laptop vs "ideal" desktops with a similar CPU. The Chip & Technologies C65550 doesn't seem to hold it back much, and in fact the system performs very well in 3D tests compared to others on Phil's Benchmark Database... all while being a laptop, and using only 27-35 watts of power, including the display... and its silent (except for the hard drive... which will be swapped with a CF card soon). Now I'm going to try hooking up my SC7 via serial port... just for kicks. 😁

What about benchmarking its low power mode? Hitting Fn+Faucet should bring it down to 66Mhz in theory

leileilol wrote:

What about benchmarking its low power mode? Hitting Fn+Faucet should bring it down to 66Mhz in theory

Will definitely be trying that some time soon.

I just spent several hours trying to get my SC-7 working on this thing... what a nightmare! If Windows is set to load the sc7's midi driver it causes an error in msgsrv32 at startup and prevents explorer from loading. I can't seem to get it to work. Even with the SC-7 disconnected it does this. It also causes a kernel32 error (in 386 something... can't remember the file) the first time installing the driver. The only way I was able to get Windows working is to go into safemode, run msconfig and remove any reference to the sc7's midi driver from the system.ini page.

So, I abandoned all that and tried getting it working in DOS.

Apparently there are no DOS drivers for the SC-7???

Makes it nearly useless for games then.

So I figured I'd try SoftMPU, since it has a serial output function... which ended up being a mess too because I couldn't get EMM386 (which it needs) to load, due to some incompatible recommended switches copied from another thread here.

After spending a few hours getting all this sorted out... and also having the laptop's monitor start going on the blink (literally blinking... I think its a bad display cable, as I was able to press on it and the problem went away)... I realized that all of the games I have on the system use DOS4GW and aren't compatible with SoftMPU in the first place.

On top of all that, I do get a port error when loading softMPU... so there's a chance it won't even function on this system anyway (possibly due to the Crystal sound chip... I'm not sure if it needs to be compatible to use its IO\IRQ to output to COM1).

This has definitely been one of those nights that I don't like retro computing...

I should have just been content with the goofy sounding FM synth...

I'm going to bed. 😒

Why the heck IS the turbo function key a faucet, anyway? Doesn't make a single lick of sense.

Figured I'd give it a try with my SC-7 and the serial option in SoftMPU. Ran into the same issues you did with the Roland driver pretty much bricking my Win98 install. Not entirely sure what's going on.

Ozzuneoj wrote:

Okay, I installed UniVBE 6.7 (DOS Only) and the vexp13 scaling TSR and it works great! I just played Descent and it was buttery smooth and filled most of the screen. The scaling is also surprisingly sharp... no loss in clarity from what I could tell.

Hi ,i have your same model from Tecra Series and has the same scaling problem,how did you install the vepx13 TSR scaling? did you only put in C:\WINDOWS the VEXP.CON file? thanks

stelth wrote:

Hi ,i have your same model from Tecra Series and has the same scaling problem,how did you install the vepx13 TSR scaling? did you only put in C:\WINDOWS the VEXP.CON file? thanks

There's a help file here that should answer your question:

http://web.archive.org/web/19990219171930/htt … com:80/vexp.htm

Recently picked this model up and it has been superb except for one thing - Games with EGA or CGA graphics. They either flat out black screen or they play with flickering vertical colour lines. I am running MSDOS 6.22 with Scitech UniVBE, I plan on finding the original C&T DOS drivers and installing those, and failing that, trying Win95 instead to see if that makes a difference.

I wonder, have you tried any pre-VGA era games and did you get them to run ok?