Well see what happens. I plan on making a full review if this thing tests good.
The hinges I had to order are not specifically for this model.
Although I suspect the actual hinge part is the same, the LCD bracket is for a 14 inch.
I am going to combine the two. or just mod the 14inch if I break the originals getting the bracket off. (the hinge part is already broken)
One problem with this laptop is you cannot get any parts for it.
These seem to be the only hinges available in the universe. minus buying a donor unit that you can't find.
The only reason I found this one was pure luck and the fact the seller didn't test it or know what they had, and they listed it wrong.

I suspect for every 500 lesser models they might of made one of these or something.
Dell launched the 8100 with 32mb ram geforce 2 at roughly the same time.
Which caused this one to get negative review with it's smaller vram.
The Dell is arguably a better laptop, however it has zero hope of having sound that works in dos, no real OPL3 and it's sound is all in all weaker in windows.
In retrospect 16mb is enough to retro game and run directx 6 games on high settings, and some light dx7 ones.
geforce 2 feature set makes it the most compatible retro gpu, you could hope to get in a laptop.

I am pretty sure no one here on vogons has one,
has ever touched this specific model
although there are plenty that have experienced the 14" with savage graphics, or some other model with a different audio chip.

I have a thinkpad 770x that I found at habit for humanity restore.
That is a pretty great laptop actually, the graphics are just underpowered.
The trident chip is very compatible though and its the 8mb version.
main issue is the HV expansion scaling, on the large 1280x1024 screen.
which was unheard of in 1998, back then 770x was the most powerful laptop you could buy.
The ISA sound is very compatible but just doesn't sound great.
However I do have a selecta dock II that it can go in that has 3 expansion slots. that I was able to slot a 3dfx card in and a awe64gold once.
I hooked it up to a external monitor. That defeats the part of it being portable tho,

The hope now is the thing will actually work and I haven't damaged it taking it apart.
That is the reason I wanted to fix it 1st though, that way it isn't working then i break it.
or the metal stuff i heard rolling around in it from the broken hinges didn't short something out.
I am hopeful that the damage to the hinges happened the whole time the seller had it, who never powered it on.
Like I said I can do a full review on it and make it famous.
That way if there are anymore of these things actually out there in the universe they might pop up for sale.

Got the T4800CT the other day and got it setup today. Apparently, the WSSXLAT.EXE TSR isn't giving me any music or sound effects for DOS games (TSR is running).

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-08-02, 07:07:

Got the T4800CT the other day and got it setup today. Apparently, the WSSXLAT.EXE TSR isn't giving me any music or sound effects for DOS games (TSR is running).

WSSXLAT.EXE very helpful and works fine with Toshiba T4850CT laptop (IRQ set to 7):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pO-wuIlNtD4

I know why mine isn't working: it doesn't have the YM262-M integrated whereas the T4850CT does.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2020-08-02, 20:20:

I know why mine isn't working: it doesn't have the YM262-M integrated whereas the T4850CT does.

Yeah. The T4850CT specifically mentions Midi capability on the spec sheet while the 4800 doesn't. The diagnostics program from Toshiba specifically calls out the YMF262 FM functionality as part of the audio test set. I guess Microsoft uses software to emulate the YMF within Windows Sound System?

Only for the Windows OS in of itself, I believe.

Good news.
Was able to modify the 14 inch hinges to work with the 15
hinges fixed.
still waiting on the new cmos battery to arrive.
till then we are partially together
New power brick arrived.
Laptop works.
1st ever geforce laptop is alive.
But is it the perfect laptop?

At this point the laptop probably deserves its own thread.

Any requests that you guys want me to test? Specific games.

LCD is perfect btw its just dirty and bad camera flash.

The only game I been able to test so far is Tyrian in pure dos.
I go
YFMIRQ 11
DSDMA
SWAPIRQ /i11 /i5

Then FM (real OPL3) and SB16 work in pure dos (at least in tyrian under pure dos)

In windows, using the VxD drivers Dos4g game such as tyrian work just fine with FM and SB16

Give me other game to test so I know if this is truely the ultimate laptop.

Any requests that you guys want me to test? Specific games.

Scrolling in Commander Keen, smooth or jerky and test please Wrath of Earth, weird game that works only in pure dos.

--

In other news... Any way to make USB mouse work under pure dos on N600C, and any solution for keys limits? I can press only two keys in time, if I press third it won't work. For eg, if I walk forward-right I can't jump.

vorob wrote on 2020-08-07, 18:04:

Any way to make USB mouse work under pure dos on N600C, and any solution for keys limits? I can press only two keys in time, if I press third it won't work. For eg, if I walk forward-right I can't jump.

only this, you still have to run cutemouse afterwards.
USB DOS Drivers

Oh, can you also record how Prince of Persia sounds on this Yamaha FM chip? Intro.

You can also retro-gaming on-the-go on modern laptops using VMs. Run DOS games with DOSBox and Windows games with QEMU. I got slightly higher 3DMark2000 score on Win98 VM on Core m3-6Y30 laptop, running official up-to-date ArchLinux and Win98 guest on QEMU KVM.

This is an ultra portable 13" FHD with 8GB RAM and 256 SSD. Windows games released in year 2000 or earlier run well, Direct3D/OpenGL/Glide. A more powerful modern laptops with Ryzen Vega Graphics or Intel Iris Plus can probably run games up to year 2004, such as UT2003, NoLF2, FarCry1 etc.

With games on VMs, there is no worry of system crash, virus or spyware. VM images on SSD can be restored in minutes. It is a perfect scenario of safe, usable, productivity machine and fun on-the-go. Crave for more portability? Try QEMU on GPD P2 Max 8.9 Ultrabook Mini. 😁

Emulation is cool but personally I seek out real hardware because emulation isn’t enough. It’s about the experience!

vorob wrote on 2020-08-07, 19:58:

Oh, can you also record how Prince of Persia sounds on this Yamaha FM chip? Intro.

Toshiba Satellite 2805-s402 Yamaha DS-XG
Game was played in windows 98se Native DOS Box
Sound was recorded with 98se sound recorder @ 44,100hz 16bit Stereo PCM WAV format.
Sound Clip was cliped with Audigy on 98se and exported in same format.
File was uploaded to sound cloud
https://soundcloud.com/tie-gw2/prince
as you can see it sounds amazing

Edited above post with link to Prince Intro, I am going to test those other games tonight if I can.

Small update it appears that this laptop maybe hard wired with sb-link.
I tried going into setupds and I selected S-IRQ and made the Irq 7.
Without using swapIRQ i just tried directly launching Prince of persia and it worked in pure dos with sound.

So i guess toshiba lied when they said sbpro in dos box only. It works in pure dos without any hacks.

verified with wolf3d

keenmaster486 wrote on 2020-08-09, 02:09:

Emulation is cool but personally I seek out real hardware because emulation isn’t enough. It’s about the experience!

It depends if one values experience in tinkering with retro hardware or playing the games with the best experience. In my context, a retro-gaming capable VM matters a lot for laptops. DOSBox for DOS games triumphs every possible real laptops for its superior sound emulation. I first played Prince of Persia on 286 with PC speaker, replayed on 486 with SB16 FM music and I finally replayed it again on DOSBox with MT32. Personally, I prefer MT32 music for every DOS games that support it (GODS, FlashBack, Sierra Online adventure series etc.) Dune2 on a later patch even support SB16+MT32, so sound effects are best from SB16 and stellar game music from MT32. I played the game several times in this setup with DOSBox on a laptop.

For Win9x games, I think no real laptops running Win98 can outperform QEMU KVM on a Ryzen or recent 8th-Gen+ Core CPU/GPU combo on any game/synthetic benchmarks (Final Reality, 3DMark2000, Quake2 timedemo etc.) While one can still build Frankenstein Win98 desktops, laptops are non-upgradable for CPU/GPU. So games would actually run faster on VMs than any real laptops running Win98 and retro laptop would no longer have a lot of sense. Sure, real hardware can still be more compatible (are they?!), but definitely not the best experience when VM works.

Just my $0.02, knowing that this is the forum section for Old Hardware. 😁

vorob wrote on 2020-08-07, 18:04:

Any requests that you guys want me to test? Specific games. […]
Show full quote

Any requests that you guys want me to test? Specific games.

Scrolling in Commander Keen, smooth or jerky and test please Wrath of Earth, weird game that works only in pure dos.

--

In other news... Any way to make USB mouse work under pure dos on N600C, and any solution for keys limits? I can press only two keys in time, if I press third it won't work. For eg, if I walk forward-right I can't jump.

I got that game wrath of earth running on that laptop in pure dos perfectly. I might make a video of it with a cell phone for proof. It's amusing to me, i never played that game before or heard of it.

I useed Cpuspd to throttle x1 and disabled the l2 cache so there was no screen flicker. Since the laptop has speedstep. this makes the laptop perform as a pentium 133 in speedsys. The sound worked perfectly after i figured out there was sb-link on the laptop and it does 8-bit sbpro emulation without the need of irqswap.
after a few windows installs and fiddling with things it came apparent that the legacy sound system part of the card if u can call it that is hardwired to IRQ 7. even tho the codec is on irq 11. The Nvidia Gefoce go is hardwired to IrQ 5 tho unfortunately, so there is that. I don't think thats a deal breaker. Any games that would refuse to use IRQ7 would probably run perfectly fine in windows where its not a issue.

Warlord wrote on 2020-08-09, 02:26:

Toshiba Satellite 2805-s402 Yamaha DS-XG Game was played in windows 98se Native DOS Box Sound was recorded with 98se sound rec […]
Show full quote

vorob wrote on 2020-08-07, 19:58:

Oh, can you also record how Prince of Persia sounds on this Yamaha FM chip? Intro.

Toshiba Satellite 2805-s402 Yamaha DS-XG
Game was played in windows 98se Native DOS Box
Sound was recorded with 98se sound recorder @ 44,100hz 16bit Stereo PCM WAV format.
Sound Clip was cliped with Audigy on 98se and exported in same format.
File was uploaded to sound cloud
https://soundcloud.com/tie-gw2/prince
as you can see it sounds amazing

That does sound very good. I guess it's no surprise that a Yamaha chipset is good at OPL2 😀

Would you mind recording some MIDI? Perhaps from Doom E1M1 or Transport Tycoon?

I'm already on the lookout for this laptop (and the other 280X models) since your experience with it is very convincing. But no luck so far.

Maybe I'm deaf but Prince on Yamaha sounded the same as Alegro in my N600c 😮

vorob wrote on 2020-08-09, 14:39:

Maybe I'm deaf but Prince on Yamaha sounded the same as Alegro in my N600c 😮

I didn't try it on the N600c myself, but if I compare it the recording on the Dell Inspiron 8100 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VDpDwbArmHMc … iew?usp=sharing), which has a similar ESS audiochip, I hear a very clear difference.

Especially the last few seconds sound very 'off key' to me on the Dell (it reminds me of the 20th Century Fox flute)