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We have a similar thread --I hope it helps.

thx but the link doesnt help so much

Oh, I thought you're looking for games instead of laptops.

Just find a laptop on ebay with a P3 in it and maybe a ATI Rage 128 Mobility. Perhaps even look for something with a GeForce 2 Go or Mobility Radeon, depending on what you want to play. Of course, it'll need a slow down app for lots of DOS games, but it will be perfect for Windows 98 era gaming.

You'll need a slow down app for DOS games unless you dig up a 486-based machine. And then the LCD is going to get very crappy. Dim, slow single or dual-scan passive screens, or early active matrix screens. Aged on top of it. Those who whine about ghosting today obviously never had a passive matrix LCD. 😀

Even with a P3-based machine you could have problems with resolution scaling. Older laptops don't have scaling hardware and you get a horribly ugly, blocky, aliased image when you go out of the native res. Either you live with it or you set the LCD not to scale at all and just letterbox the game. This is a good reason to get one with a Radeon or GeForce. These GPUs do their own image scaling.

Make sure the audio chip in the laptop supports Sound Blaster in DOS or at least legacy support in Windows 9x. ESS is pretty good for that. ISA solutions usually support SB without drivers, but the PCI solutions need a DOS emulation driver.

Wait,

I remember reading something about running AC97 onboard sound in DOS. Also, this driver may be interesting.

But doesn't all laptop have AC97 sound chip?

It only works with some VIA southbridge like vt82c686A

I had a mobo with such sound
SBpro dsp is emulated in hardware and works in real mode, it just need VIAUDIO.COM, to be activated
OPL3 only works with emm386 and need a hudge tsr VIAFMTSR.COM
iirc they can be unloaded with /U

StickByDos wrote:

It only works with some VIA southbridge like vt82c686A

I see. How do we know whether a laptop has VIA southbridge? Are such thing common with modern PIII or P4 laptop? I think it's quite interesting to have, say, P4 laptop that can enable sound in real DOS.

If it has a VIA chipset, it almost certainly has a VIA southbridge. But yea, it only works with the older VIA chipsets like MVP3/4 and KT133/A I believe. You need a VIA 686A, 686B, or VT8231 southbridge.

You'll find MVP3/4 chipsets in K6 laptops. MVP3/4 are actually a mobile chipsets. KM133 is the mobile version of KT133 (for Athlons).

I put together this chipset article on Wikipedia a few months back.

Official drivers on VIA ARENA:

DOS sound: This driver supports DOS sound for VIA VT82C686A/VT82C686B/VT8231 southbridges only. The VIAAUDIO.COM file mentioned in the Readme concerning DOS sound can be obtained from this old audio driver package. It is no longer supplied in the Vinyl_AudioCodec driver package.