VOGONS


Cropped screen

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Reply 20 of 24, by vorob

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Just bought Siemens Nixdorf Scenic Mobile 710 and now I'm in the same boat. At first I was shocked by this tiny window, like mentioned above. But with the help of VEXP, I was able to make the window bigger, playable...

drastikterror can you share any news on this laptop? Maybe you found some useful tools to work with it? Currently, it's just general interest.

I'm really happy to own a device that supports native dos with general midi 😀

Reply 21 of 24, by cyberluke

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Hi, just got this laptop. Any news regarding screen scaling? It has general midi like opl3? Or what soundset? Interesting!

Reply 22 of 24, by vorob

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All I can say is that it is based on ESS ES1878 & ES690F where ES1878 includes some OPL3 clone and ES690F is a WaveTable synth with a dedicated ROM chip and can play General Midi music under pure dos without drivers.

Sounds nice! https://youtu.be/l-F7u2S9NVM

How much did it cost to you? What's the condition?

Reply 23 of 24, by cyberluke

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That looks great. I just wanted some travel laptop for old games. I think it does not have a power to run Quake 2 on 640x480, only 320x240 😁 and no OpenGL. But the rest looks good. I got it here for 100 Eur including floppy + cd-rom + docking station + bag: https://www.ebay.com/itm/143656153872 ...I was lucky. Shipping from Germany to Czechia was around 15 Eur. These Scenic Mobile units are still not that expensive like Compaq LTE or older Siemens Nixdorf PCD-5ND and PCD-4ND. I see it has ES1878, did not know it as also ES690F.

I'm starting to learn how to fix laptops 😀. I need to fix display on Siemens Nixdorf 510 (you can get these for 15-20 Eur on E-Bay, but mostly need to fix something).

The next step for this 710 is to open battery case and buy a new Li-on battery cell, then put it inside and voila! It should stay alive at least for 2-3 hours.

I tried Stunts game and the scaling seems to be ok. I don't have any black border (using vexp.com m1 command), but you can see the scaling is not proportional.

Do you have some example of your music, what can be created? I started with FruityLoops ten years ago and nowadays I'm more of Ableton + Reason guy. You could also use the gameport and connect something like Roland SC-55, right? I use it for retrogaming 😀

Reply 24 of 24, by vorob

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I’m just playing games, not doing music. The key point of this laptop is support of general midi under dos.

VEXP is a tool, indeed, but with this laptop it can’t stretch games to full screen 🙁

What is special with Siemens Nixdorf 510?