Thinkpad 600E or 600X would be at the top of my list.

blank001 wrote:

Thinkpad 600E or 600X would be at the top of my list.

I really wish I could get one of those, however getting this laptop in Czech Republic(middle of Europe) is impossible, most of them got recycled.

I use thinkpad T21 and I think it is the latest thinkpad that has dos sound drivers.

You will have a very hard time finding anything that will match your requirements, as compromises will have to be made in different areas of the laptop. CPU wise, it should be fairly easy to find a laptop equipped with a Pentium III that will fit the bill, however finding a GPU that will "play more or less everything without major sacrifices" is very difficult. Nvidia didn't start having a foothold on laptops until they released mobile variants for their GeForce cards (GeForce2/4 Go etc) and 3Dfx cards were not on laptops at all. Your best bet is a variant of the S3 Savage4 or an ATi Rage 128 variant, both of which are slower than their desktop counterparts and not ideal in the first place thanks to driver issues which are further accentuated in laptop GPUs. Very often you will find Pentium II and III laptops that don't feature a 3D Accelerator at all.

As far as sound goes, that's another interesting piece of the puzzle as by this point everything had moved on to using the PCI bus. So, while Windows sound acceleration should be fine, under DOS it might prove to be a massive headache, as these sound cards tended to need a TSR or some sort of driver to get sound under DOS and while they usually did alright when it came to replicating the digital sound effects of the Sound Blaster, Adlib/OPL2/3 and/or MIDI support under DOS was usually pretty bad, often resorting to awful approximation of OPL2 through MIDI instruments (check out Sound Blaster Live! for an example of that). That could be a big problem.

And then you should also take into account other issues, such as that the battery for the laptop will probably be long dead and whether you find a replacement or not is not always up to you, plus the fact that laptop screens would produce a lot of ghosting making them unsuitable for games, granted, by the late 90's/early 00's the situation had improved immensely.
I think that what you're looking for is really really hard to find. There were quite a few mATX Pentium 3, Athlon XP and Pentium 4 motherboards, you could get a nice sleek and short case to house them and then they won't take that much space and you'll have a cool looking retro PC 😀.

Baoran wrote:

I use thinkpad T21 and I think it is the latest thinkpad that has dos sound drivers.

How does it sound ?

Garrett W wrote:

You will have a very hard time finding anything that will match your requirements, as compromises will have to be made in differ […]
Show full quote

You will have a very hard time finding anything that will match your requirements, as compromises will have to be made in different areas of the laptop. CPU wise, it should be fairly easy to find a laptop equipped with a Pentium III that will fit the bill, however finding a GPU that will "play more or less everything without major sacrifices" is very difficult. Nvidia didn't start having a foothold on laptops until they released mobile variants for their GeForce cards (GeForce2/4 Go etc) and 3Dfx cards were not on laptops at all. Your best bet is a variant of the S3 Savage4 or an ATi Rage 128 variant, both of which are slower than their desktop counterparts and not ideal in the first place thanks to driver issues which are further accentuated in laptop GPUs. Very often you will find Pentium II and III laptops that don't feature a 3D Accelerator at all.

As far as sound goes, that's another interesting piece of the puzzle as by this point everything had moved on to using the PCI bus. So, while Windows sound acceleration should be fine, under DOS it might prove to be a massive headache, as these sound cards tended to need a TSR or some sort of driver to get sound under DOS and while they usually did alright when it came to replicating the digital sound effects of the Sound Blaster, Adlib/OPL2/3 and/or MIDI support under DOS was usually pretty bad, often resorting to awful approximation of OPL2 through MIDI instruments (check out Sound Blaster Live! for an example of that). That could be a big problem.

And then you should also take into account other issues, such as that the battery for the laptop will probably be long dead and whether you find a replacement or not is not always up to you, plus the fact that laptop screens would produce a lot of ghosting making them unsuitable for games, granted, by the late 90's/early 00's the situation had improved immensely.
I think that what you're looking for is really really hard to find. There were quite a few mATX Pentium 3, Athlon XP and Pentium 4 motherboards, you could get a nice sleek and short case to house them and then they won't take that much space and you'll have a cool looking retro PC 😀.

Thanks for your post, matx computer from this era would be nice for sure, however finding one seems to be quite a chalenge in these parts 😒

Violett'Blossom wrote:

Baoran wrote:

I use thinkpad T21 and I think it is the latest thinkpad that has dos sound drivers.

How does it sound ?

Compatibility is good, but does not sound very good if you compare to sound blaster cards. Everything is relative though because it sound much better if your other option is to just use pc speaker.
If you can find a laptop with a opl chip, that would of course be the best option, but this is laptop that has at least working sound even if FM does not sound quite how it is suppose to sound like in many dos games.

Baoran wrote:

I use thinkpad T21 and I think it is the latest thinkpad that has dos sound drivers.

I think the latest are T22/A22m/A22p.

Violett'Blossom wrote:

How does it sound ?

Like this:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/crystal … dfusion-dos-fm/

Found a T21 on ebay if you are tempted to get one.

Garrett W wrote:

Found a T21 on ebay if you are tempted to get one.

It's lovely, but he wont send it into Czech Republic. 😢

dr_st wrote:

I think the latest are T22/A22m/A22p. […]
Show full quote

Baoran wrote:

I use thinkpad T21 and I think it is the latest thinkpad that has dos sound drivers.

I think the latest are T22/A22m/A22p.

Violett'Blossom wrote:

How does it sound ?

Like this:
https://cloakedthargoid.wordpress.com/crystal … dfusion-dos-fm/

It doesn't sound half bad and doesn't seem to skip notes which is a nice addon.

It just feels like those machines are out of reach here in Czech Rep. 😒

If you are that determined, you could always use a service to ship it to you. You essentially have the seller ship it to them and for an additional fee (usually not much) they ship it to you. Are you sure the seller doesn't provide international shipping though? Sometimes they do but do not update the sale accordingly, always a good idea to ask.

Maybe you could try a Compaq Armada E500. Almost as solid as the Thinkpads, also has a nice (and very compatible) ESS1688 set to default 220h-5-1. There's one on a well-known auction site now at a decent price (though with 4 days bidding to go) in Germany with a seller prepared to ship to anywhere in EU (EUR 15.99 shipping to CZ).

A bunch of the old Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops have a Yamaha YMF744 soundcard built it. They also have the PC-PCI/SBLink port wired up so you get full DOS support.

You won't really have much 3d acceleration, but that is going to be the same with pretty much any laptop of that era.

If you want 3D acceleration and Windows 98 support, you could pick up an old Toshiba laptop with an nVidia FX5200 Go! or ATI Radeon graphics.

But that leaves you without DOS sound support unless you can get some version of a card services driver to work on it AND get a PCMCIA sound card that fully supports DOS.

The other possible option is to use an old laptop that has DOS sound support and a cardbus slot (32-bit version of PCMCIA) and then use a Magma PCI expansion system. That way you could theoretically stick a 3dfx or other 3d accelerator card in the expansion chassis and be set.... but you would still need an external monitor for that type of setup. And getting a full MAGMA setup is not usually cheap, especially one with the cardbus card.

cyclone3d wrote:

A bunch of the old Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops have a Yamaha YMF744 soundcard built it. They also have the PC-PCI/SBLink port wired up so you get full DOS support.

Precisely. I'm the lucky owner of one of those (Sony Vaio PCG-Z505JE SuperSlim Pro)- it's a powerhouse. Its analog output is crystal clear, zero noise, and it has excellent DOS compatibility as well. Under WIndows, the DX-G wavetable is one of my favorites.

I also own an Acer Travelmate 603TER, which packs a ESS Solo, also with excellent DOS compatibility, plus an ATI RAGE Mobility AGP which allows for some 3D acceleration under Windows (I can play Half-Life at 640x480 on both OpenGL and Direct3D at a fairly decent framerate).

Violett'Blossom wrote:

I am looking for laptop for win 98 era with sound support for late dos games, since I don't have much space at home at the momen […]
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I am looking for laptop for win 98 era with sound support for late dos games, since I don't have much space at home at the moment.And I want something that can play more or less everything without major sacrifices.

I would love if it had these:

Boxy design. 😊
Max 13" TFT screen.
Decent keyboard.
Floppy and CD-ROM combo.
Easy to get replacement parts for (CMOS battery, drives)

If you think of any model, I would love to hear it. 😊

The Sony Vaio was an amazing find- but it lacks both a CD and floppy drive. Both were sold as optional, external drives, but I wasn't lucky enough to get any). It packs a 12" screen and very small footprint. The GPU is quite decent for 2D, but no 3D accelelartion support at all. It is a pain to do any maintenance on it, hopefully I haven't needed to do any 😀. The keyboard is not that bad for a laptop of its size. Very boxy 😁
The Acer Travelmate packs a CD drive, but no floppy. It has an ATI RAGE MOBILITY GPU, as I said above, does some decent 3D acceleration for early 97, 98 games. It has a 13" screen, the keyboard feels great (good key travel). Very Boxy 😁

bregolin wrote:

Precisely. I'm the lucky owner of one of those (Sony Vaio PCG-Z505JE SuperSlim Pro)- it's a powerhouse. Its analog output is cry […]
Show full quote

cyclone3d wrote:

A bunch of the old Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops have a Yamaha YMF744 soundcard built it. They also have the PC-PCI/SBLink port wired up so you get full DOS support.

Precisely. I'm the lucky owner of one of those (Sony Vaio PCG-Z505JE SuperSlim Pro)- it's a powerhouse. Its analog output is crystal clear, zero noise, and it has excellent DOS compatibility as well. Under WIndows, the DX-G wavetable is one of my favorites.

I also own an Acer Travelmate 603TER, which packs a ESS Solo, also with excellent DOS compatibility, plus an ATI RAGE Mobility AGP which allows for some 3D acceleration under Windows (I can play Half-Life at 640x480 on both OpenGL and Direct3D at a fairly decent framerate).

The Sony Vaio was an amazing find- but it lacks both a CD and floppy drive. Both were sold as optional, external drives, but I wasn't lucky enough to get any). It packs a 12" screen and very small footprint. The GPU is quite decent for 2D, but no 3D accelelartion support at all. It is a pain to do any maintenance on it, hopefully I haven't needed to do any 😀. The keyboard is not that bad for a laptop of its size. Very boxy 😁
The Acer Travelmate packs a CD drive, but no floppy. It has an ATI RAGE MOBILITY GPU, as I said above, does some decent 3D acceleration for early 97, 98 games. It has a 13" screen, the keyboard feels great (good key travel). Very Boxy 😁

When I found out about the Sony Vaio laptops having the Yamaha sound I started buying a bunch of them. I've got quite a few. Some of them need work, but I got them anyway.
Glad I got them when I did because now they are very hard to find for a good price.

I've got a bunch of the add-on floppy and CD drives as well. Most came with the laptops I bought. By themselves they are still pretty cheap here in the US.

cyclone3d wrote:

A bunch of the old Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops have a Yamaha YMF744 soundcard built it. They also have the PC-PCI/SBLink port […]
Show full quote

A bunch of the old Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops have a Yamaha YMF744 soundcard built it. They also have the PC-PCI/SBLink port wired up so you get full DOS support.

You won't really have much 3d acceleration, but that is going to be the same with pretty much any laptop of that era.

If you want 3D acceleration and Windows 98 support, you could pick up an old Toshiba laptop with an nVidia FX5200 Go! or ATI Radeon graphics.

But that leaves you without DOS sound support unless you can get some version of a card services driver to work on it AND get a PCMCIA sound card that fully supports DOS.

The other possible option is to use an old laptop that has DOS sound support and a cardbus slot (32-bit version of PCMCIA) and then use a Magma PCI expansion system. That way you could theoretically stick a 3dfx or other 3d accelerator card in the expansion chassis and be set.... but you would still need an external monitor for that type of setup. And getting a full MAGMA setup is not usually cheap, especially one with the cardbus card.

Seems like I should get two separate laptops.

dionb wrote:

Maybe you could try a Compaq Armada E500. Almost as solid as the Thinkpads, also has a nice (and very compatible) ESS1688 set to default 220h-5-1. There's one on a well-known auction site now at a decent price (though with 4 days bidding to go) in Germany with a seller prepared to ship to anywhere in EU (EUR 15.99 shipping to CZ).

I will try to bid on it, thanks for the tip 😊