MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 00:01:

I revised my post to be as open as I can be. Please don't waste time trying to solve this puzzle because I have searched Archive.org and ChatGPT and Google and got nothing but disappointments and a headache. I try every few years, 🤣.

For what it's worth, I totally believe that you had a demo of a Star Wars game that came with a broken build of DirectX (I remember lots of DX troubles from Win95 times). But it probably wasn't DX4, sorry.

But to get back on topic, I think your theory that 90s games were actually designed with laptop LCDs in mind is... complete and utter hogwash. Sorry 😁

I hardly knew anybody that used a laptop for gaming in the 90s. At least that's not what it was primarily for. I didnt move away from CRTs until maybe 2005ish. I had two 19" AG Neovo 1280x1024 screens. I think not too many people used multiple monitors back then

feda wrote on 2026-01-21, 05:29:

I think your theory that 90s games were actually designed with laptop LCDs in mind is... complete and utter hogwash. Sorry 😁

Hang on. Slow down. I am not claiming games were designed for laptops first. I am claiming games were designed for the lowest common denominator, which included laptops.

From roughly 1994–1999, many publishers required games to be fully playable, shippable, and reviewable using software rendering alone. In other words: “Make sure it runs everywhere without special hardware.”

And in roughly 1994-1999, hardware vendors such as Compaq were selling a class of laptop as the total PC replacement. I had one. True, it had a VGA port to optionally connect a CRT but no disclaimer saying that was necessary for it to fulfil its role of PC replacement.

Game publishers stopped adding “not suitable for laptops” on their packaging when that warning was no longer reliably true. That means they tested, and their testers must have had evidence it was no longer generally true. Unreal shipped with no mention of CRTs or LCDs.

And, my 1990s gaming tower was paired with an LCD. Not originally. What actually happened is that my 15" CRT malfunctioned and my eyes were dried from its radiation so my chosen replacement was a 14" LCD sold at Argos. For those that don't know, Argos only sells mainstream home wares.

So who was treating CRT as a special hardware requirement? Someone was:

• The answer includes 3Dfx and competitive gamers who broke in-game physics.
• The answer excludes casual gamers, game studios, publishers, and PC vendors.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 11:36:

Hang on. Slow down. I am not claiming gamers were designed for laptops first. I am claiming games were designed for the lowest common denominator, which included laptops.

It included laptops only incidentally.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 11:36:

Game publishers stopped adding “not suitable for laptops” from their packaging when that warning was no longer reliably true.

I've actually never seen such labels on 90s game boxes except for jo22's Albion example earlier in the thread. It was not common, I think. Certainly not on late 90s games.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 11:36:

Unreal shipped with no mention of CRTs or LCDs.

Of course not, why would it? CRTs were not a "special hardware requirement", they were simply the standard for home desktop computers until the early 2000s.
System requirements didn't typically mention CRT/LCD, just the resolution and color mode your video card needed to support.

90s laptops and LCDs were targeted at businesspeople and workplaces, not gamers. When games ran well on a laptop, it was a bonus.

I dunno, man. Most of the stuff you've been saying here is sketchy.

feda wrote on 2026-01-21, 13:16:

I've actually never seen such labels on 90s game boxes except for jo22's Albion example earlier in the thread. It was not common, I think. Certainly not on late 90s games.

That's right, there was a different divide in the early 90s when VESA, MIDI and OPL mattered to gamers.

Early '90s laptops had proprietary connectors and esoteric input devices. There were no PC replacement laptops. And, maybe those earlier 386/486 laptops entirely neglected VESA, MIDI and OPL compatibility?

Late 90s laptops had USB and VGA ports. They were no longer weird by design.

Very entertaining discussion but a discussion based on a formal fallacy. Just a single false conclusion throws the rest into question, the assertion that a software render meant that the game would run on lowest common denominator therefore on LCD displays or laptops disregards the fact that hardware acceleration was expensive and often unavailable, but common CPUs of the time were capable of doing a passable rendering without special hardware and therefore could be run on a wider variety of systems. The ability to run on a laptop for instance then is only predicated on whether the cpu is fast enough and how tolerant the player is of the experience. There is no requirement for a game to be aimed at a laptop or even be expected to run on a laptop for a laptop to be capable of playing the game. In the 90s the vast majority of pc gaming was done on desktops and most had CRTs but 3d acceleration wasn't universal.

feda wrote on 2026-01-21, 13:16:

90s laptops and LCDs were targeted at businesspeople and workplaces, not gamers.

That is not correct. There was a class of laptop specifically sold as home PC replacement - not for office!

Those PC replacement laptops were too big for offices and too power hungry for significant mobile work; 2-4hrs from the lithium batteries is hardly suitable for 8 hour work day. And, they didn't look corporate either. Mine was 166MHz and in black, but from the same product line as the attached. The whole product line were basically desktop PCs conveniently packaged for regularly moving between rooms in a house.

Different brands had different styles, but they all looked too suave to be a corporate laptop in a satchel. The Apple iBook could count among them, but came later and is not a PC.

sydres wrote on 2026-01-21, 13:51:

Very entertaining discussion but a discussion based on a formal fallacy. Just a single false conclusion throws the rest into question, the assertion that a software render meant that the game would run on lowest common denominator therefore on LCD displays or laptops disregards the fact that hardware acceleration was expensive and often unavailable, but common CPUs of the time were capable of doing a passable rendering without special hardware and therefore could be run on a wider variety of systems. The ability to run on a laptop for instance then is only predicated on whether the cpu is fast enough and how tolerant the player is of the experience. There is no requirement for a game to be aimed at a laptop or even be expected to run on a laptop for a laptop to be capable of playing the game. In the 90s the vast majority of pc gaming was done on desktops and most had CRTs but 3d acceleration wasn't universal.

That's a non sequitur because you're saying the same thing as me, and then excluding laptops through emotion without logic or evidence.

1990s games were not designed for laptops. What they were designed for is stable 30–60 fps operation!

Were 100FPS+ CRT gaming rigs “special hardware”? Yes. Unequivocally. By market share, and by software behaviour.

Were late-1990s laptops “special hardware”? No. And by the actual market definitions of the time, these were the small form factor normal PC.

Did games target compact small form factors? Not specifically. Did games target oversized towers with noisy coolers? Not specifically. The form factor is irrelevant!

Did games target heavy CRTs? Not specifically. Did games target light LCDs? Not specifically. The display panel is irrelevant!

PC games of the 1990s were not designed specifically for laptops, nor were they designed specifically for anything else. Instead, PC games of the 1990s were designed for the 30-60 FPS performance and display envelope that included laptops.

That’s not hogwash. That's the record.

P.S. Most gaming occurred on CRTs because CRTs were cheap and inherited.

I tried 3 different laptops for gaming between 1999 and 2004.
1999 - IBM Thinkpad 240X - Mini mobile Celeron 300 for DOS games
2001 - Presario P3 933 w/ radeon mobility for counterstrike
2004 - Asus with Radeon 9600 mobility for counterstrike source
None of them ended up being pleasant for me to use for gaming unless I put a keyboard and a CRT monitor on them and even then they tended to just scrape by as minimally viable performance.

I found the response times on LCD screens < 2006 to be too slow for my eyes.

Maybe I'm particular though. I found 60Hz refresh on a CRT to be unpleasant too.

douglar wrote on 2026-01-21, 21:29:

I tried 3 different laptops for gaming between 1999 and 2004. 1999 - IBM Thinkpad 240X - Mini mobile Celeron 300 for DOS games […]
Show full quote

I tried 3 different laptops for gaming between 1999 and 2004.
1999 - IBM Thinkpad 240X - Mini mobile Celeron 300 for DOS games
2001 - Presario P3 933 w/ radeon mobility for counterstrike
2004 - Asus with Radeon 9600 mobility for counterstrike source
None of them ended up being pleasant for me to use for gaming unless I put a keyboard and a CRT monitor on them and even then they tended to just scrape by as minimally viable performance.

I found the response times on LCD screens < 2006 to be too slow for my eyes.

Maybe I'm particular though. I found 60Hz refresh on a CRT to be unpleasant too.

Let's be frank - all of us must have been enthusiastic about our PCs, or we would not be on Vogons today! 😉

My own CRT broke because I uprated the GPU (many times) and pushed my display too hard: the max resolution, the max refresh rate, and eventually the mechanical parts in the CRT went squiffy. I couldn't do that on a laptop. I couldn't even put a 3Dfx card in a laptop. So, like you, I didn't use a laptop for games.

But, I'm also not denying that a SONY PS1 opponent had lost before the game started. I'm also not denying that my tuned rig broke in-game physics.I'm not denying it exceeded the "recommended requirements" printed on the PC game packaging. I'm not denying that my rig was one of the exceptions.

Mass market games don't target the exceptions, they target.. the biggest pool possible!

Hi, internet slop poster here. Allow me to tell you once again that CRTs are BETTER because they're BLURRY (I've only ever seen an NTSC composite signal on an old TV)

First time I remember seeing a laptop in a game ad was about 2003 when Virgin was promoting their budget game range, because you know, if a game was 2 years behind the curve, like budget rereleases were, a laptop would be more likely to run it well.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-21, 23:10:

First time I remember seeing a laptop in a game ad was about 2003 when Virgin was promoting their budget game range, because you know, if a game was 2 years behind the curve, like budget rereleases were, a laptop would be more likely to run it well.

Alienware had extreme gaming laptops in 2002, but they were a low volume niche company that shipped water-cooled gaming towers.

@sydres
Oof, yes and no: I think it's hard to find a definitive answer here.
It already begins by defining the 90s as such.

To me, the 90s was about MS-DOS, OS/2, Lemmings and Windows 3.1, for example. Or buying comics at a local kiosk.
You had online services such as CompuServe, blinking shoes, stereoscopic illussions (magic eye series), chess computers, gray GameBoy, Tetris and 16-Bit consoles.

To all other people it's about Windows 95, Doom, 3dfx, AOL and the Sony PlayStation or playing Goldeneye on N64,
Tamagotchi, looking up Anime pics on the internet and playing Pokèmon..

Here's even a "90s video" that totally skips DOS and Windows 3.x:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iY8s2qSuHE

Why is this? I've spent years thinking about it and I think it's because the 90s were a time of transition, more than the other decades before it.
Being the final flare up of the 20th century, that makes sense and wasn't too surprising.
So there wasn't just one flavor of the 90s, but at least two.

The first half was an extension of the 80s, were people still had CRTs, the NES and analogue landlines.
By mid-90s, the 80s started to fade and the "foreshocks" of the 2000s were perceptible.
Flatscreens, less fluffy haircuts, people dressing in boring cloths, boy groups, Windows 98.. 😉

That being said, it also mattered where someone had lived.
Some countries were a few years behind or had cultural differences.
The internet though tends to default to western civilization, often.
Which means that VHS and 80s pop culture sometimes didn't "hit" a region until mid-late 90s because people had no access earlier.
Which in turn might be confusing to everyone involved in a discussion.

PS: About the 90s style, you guys surely know about the translucent N64 versions and the original iMac.
But do you also know about the "EasyNow PC" by any chance ? 😉
It's from 90s, but it does look as if it was from 2001-2004 or so.
But the interesting thing is that it was available with both CRT and TFT screens.

https://www.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/com … still_fires_up/

https://www.reddit.com/r/90sComputers/comment … puter_ever_the/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luq8_eWfKq4

So, going back to the original claim which is something along the lines of ~30fps being chosen as a target framerate because LCD monitors that existed at the time were going to be used by some subset of people and those monitors didn't have an appreciable benefit of higher rates due to slow response time. Ergo, a framerate was chosen that didn't exceed the lowest common denominator of display performance.

Is there a better explaination for the choice of frame rates? Yes - processing capacity. If you ask a developer why a particular frame rate target was chosen, it's almost always related to processing capacity. Wolfenstein 3D demos run at 17.5fps to ensure that demo playback was consistent and deterministic so it didn't break on slower machines, however gameplay is variable and runs at up to 70hz as it doesn't need to be deterministic. For Doom, a 35hz update rate was chosen as it was unrealistic for computers of the time to calculate the complex game logic at 70hz, it would have led to lower performance on systems of the time.

LCD monitors improving is coincidental with performance improvements allowing higher performance targets, not causal. In order for it to be the case, there would need to be something from anyone in the historical record stating that display technology is the reason, however I expect you will not find it and you will only find performance or processing related reasons stated.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-22, 00:55:

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-21, 23:10:

First time I remember seeing a laptop in a game ad was about 2003 when Virgin was promoting their budget game range, because you know, if a game was 2 years behind the curve, like budget rereleases were, a laptop would be more likely to run it well.

Alienware had extreme gaming laptops in 2002, but they were a low volume niche company that shipped water-cooled gaming towers.

First time I saw a notebook depicted was in a DOS game from mid-90s.
Okay, it was more of a palmtop, rather: An XT class notebook running DOS.
The game was an advertising game for the SPD political party, Abenteuer Europa.
The protagonist in game the is a news reporter and carries his notebook with him.

This screenshot shows the notebook in the inventory.:
https://www.mobygames.com/game/40443/abenteue … ots/dos/366375/

Such PC/XT class notebooks were from late 80s/early 90s and often ran on AA batteries or simiosr.
They usually had an CGA-capable LC display and MS-DOS 5 in ROM (or something comparable).

Examples are the HP 200 LX or the Poqet PC:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poqet_PC
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_200LX

By todays standards they'd be called sub notebooks, netbooks or UMPCs, maybe.

Edit: I know, it's a bit of a far stretch.
An 80s computer with CGA screen isn't exactly a valid comparison when we think of laptop gaming. 😅

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 14:01:

feda wrote on 2026-01-21, 13:16:

90s laptops and LCDs were targeted at businesspeople and workplaces, not gamers.

That is not correct. There was a class of laptop specifically sold as home PC replacement - not for office!

Those PC replacement laptops were too big for offices and too power hungry for significant mobile work; 2-4hrs from the lithium batteries is hardly suitable for 8 hour work day. And, they didn't look corporate either. Mine was 166MHz and in black, but from the same product line as the attached. The whole product line were basically desktop PCs conveniently packaged for regularly moving between rooms in a house.

This is not a home gaming system. It's a work computer.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 21:08:

sydres wrote on 2026-01-21, 13:51:

Very entertaining discussion but a discussion based on a formal fallacy. Just a single false conclusion throws the rest into question, the assertion that a software render meant that the game would run on lowest common denominator therefore on LCD displays or laptops disregards the fact that hardware acceleration was expensive and often unavailable, but common CPUs of the time were capable of doing a passable rendering without special hardware and therefore could be run on a wider variety of systems. The ability to run on a laptop for instance then is only predicated on whether the cpu is fast enough and how tolerant the player is of the experience. There is no requirement for a game to be aimed at a laptop or even be expected to run on a laptop for a laptop to be capable of playing the game. In the 90s the vast majority of pc gaming was done on desktops and most had CRTs but 3d acceleration wasn't universal.

That's a non sequitur because you're saying the same thing as me, and then excluding laptops through emotion without logic or evidence.

He's not excluding laptops. He's simply saying that most PC gaming in the 90s happened on desktop computers which were usually paired with CRTs but didn't necessarily have a 3D card at first.
This is a historical fact that we've been trying to hammer home to you.

MattRocks wrote on 2026-01-21, 21:08:

1990s games were not designed for laptops[...]Did games target heavy CRTs? Not specifically. Did games target light LCDs? Not specifically[...]
PC games of the 1990s were not designed specifically for laptops,

P.S. Most gaming occurred on CRTs

Good, we've finally established that. No more hogwash 😀

feda wrote on 2026-01-22, 07:35:

This is not a home gaming system. It's a work computer.

It is not a work computer. It's a general purpose home PC in a laptop form factor. Apple iBook followed the same philosophy and was very explicitly not a corporate work laptop: "Remember that the iBook is not designed for professional use." (attached screenshot)

This class of laptop were for general home use. They were too heavy for convenient mobile use - they stayed at home. They matched the requirements of contemporary games at normal frame rates (not enthusiast grade high-FPS that break in-game physics). They were not well remembered because all laptops were era-frozen short lived and uneconomical, while the towers became frankenboxes of no particular era. This meant that for their function a PC replacement laptop was great for about six months, and then ironically ready for replacing.

No game was ever sold as needing spec sufficiently high to break the game. No game was ever sold with overclocking instructions. Only a small minority of game buyers also bought into the gamer PC culture with an intent to break the game physics and gain competitive edge (e.g. aspirational Alienware with water cooling). Yes, Alienware were advertised alongside iBook. No, they didn't provide the same gamer experience. My point is, one does not invalidate the other and the iBook was more mainstream - and the easiest PC replacement laptop to find useful commentary on.

The nut of disagreement: The philosophy of replacing desktops with laptops predates archived online discussions, while the artefacts survive as misunderstood orphans in eBay listings. But, categorically, SONY and Compaq and others made clear they were not work computers.

Jo22 wrote on 2026-01-22, 01:43:

The internet though tends to default to western civilization, often.

I don't disagree with any of your post and just wanted to pick up on the Internet - it meant so many different things at once.

• Direct dial-up to download virus definitions direct from anti-virus firm.
• Dial-up ISP connection.
• Geocities, internet rings.
• ICQ, IRC, Yahoo! games, etc.

Sadly, what it didn't offer was a record of consumer-grade knowledge sharing. I remember asking for help on a forum with repairing my Compaq Presario keyboard, but importantly the information passed from person-to-person, not from repository-to-person. The closest there was to a consolidated repository of opinion was CNET, but that was entirely corporate controlled and risk averse.

So when we look back, we don't have records of what people were actually doing. Archive.org shows some sites (including some of mine) that were presenting specialised points of view on something, but those were not just static pages: They are now static presentations within a forgotten dynamic context. When my sites talked about a an online meet with an overseas teams, it didn't detail motivations or what computers were being used. My site didn't even detail my own computer - and that is important too.

What we have forgotten is that our computer specs were our team secrets because how to get extra FPS was knowledge that converted into competitive advantage.

When we try to recover what was really happening (in that case ~1997) the problem is that we cannot recover those social behaviours. We see the artefact, and we don't see how it was used by its owner. It's like an archeologist finding a bit of pottery - holding it to a light doesn't tell the archeologist what the owner actually did with that pottery. The exceptions are accidental details like finding blood stains on a broken edge, but there remains a lot of unknowns.

My archived sites capture some accidental unknowns. One captured that someone else was trying to create a SONY PS1 team for Motorhead, and seeing that reminded me of that person and why they really quit. They quit because PS1 was framerate limited (in-game performance limited) limited while PCs were not. They couldn't join the existing teams because they couldn't join in the competitive framerate culture. Then I remembered the PC players who enjoyed the game, but who had laptops - they quit for the same reason.

What we all had in common is that we all bought the game, we all enjoyed it enough to try joining online, and we all encountered people who were racing with overclocked gamer rigs. The important fact is: there is no record of why we quit. I eventually quit too. There is no record for why I quit too. The record only shows I stopped updating my website.

When we say "everyone gamed on CRTs," we miss the point that nobody spun up a website and hand rolled HTML to give an explanations to Archive.org on why they stopped showing up! There is no record saying, "I’m leaving because my laptop caps at 35 FPS and everyone else is exploiting physics." But, importantly, they did leave for exactly that reason. They said so on ICQ!

Why I really quit? I don't remember the first reason but when I tried to return the other players had moved to >300FPS and I had moved to an LCD. Even if I could have chased FPS again, would seeing the FPS counter stick at 888 due to temporal blur be worth doing? (I am exaggerating the 888 for effect, but there was a cultural shift). I moved to the likes of Quake III, and eventually to Civilisation III.

1997 PC total sales were about 100 Million units by then, but from top 10 laptop vendors, the number hadn't even gone to 10s of millions, it's hard to nail down, but something like 5 million is a reasonable guess. Game companies were just not even going to consider a platform with less than double digit market penetration. They barely considered Macs, and they had dropped AtariST and Amiga when they had higher installed user bases than any laptops in 1995, so there wasn't enough laptops around to do special things for for software selling at less than $100 a copy. Sure, Gridpad developed optimised applications for their customers who were paying thousands a unit for their niche portable applications, business stuff, not volume consumer stuff. Sales were accelerating, IBM had about a third of the market, though declining in proportion due to more players and shipped it's 10 millionth thinkpad in march 2000, but that was on an upward curve, and 3 year old systems were not worth considering to game on at the time, so thinking about it backwards in time some half of those thinkpads were obsolete by then.

Just because laptop sales got equal to desktops in mid noughts and beat them through the 2010s doesn't mean there was a lot around in the 1990s. They were special purpose, very few considered them. It took tech advances, more volume and price dropping something like 75% for laptops to be consumer targets. A rich guy might have dropped $5000 on one for his kid in the 1990s, but that was STILL a crippled machine for it's time, CPU would have been middling to entry level for the contemporary desktops, screen would have been awful even if it was less awful than laptops a year or two years prior.

Being a tech nerd and at school gave me the "use case" for a laptop in 1995, I paid $500 for an off lease refurb that was a 20mhz 386, it was a minimum viable windows 3.1 system not a gamer. You'd lose your place if you typed too fast. In this high tech savvy college environment, number of laptops was about 1 in 50 at the time, while nearly everyone had a desktop, compared to general populace market penetration of 20% or less thus far. And like mine they were usually older models. Buddy got a clearout deal on a 486 SX machine in 96.

Anyway, stupid assertions come up all the time from not realizing relative expense of options, relative availability of options, how quick tech was moving, and making general assumption that markets and environments and demands were exactly identical 30 years ago to what they are today. I have literally met people that think like "Most cars today have GPS, GPS was launched in the 1980s, therefore most cars in the 1980s had GPS."

Whether anyone said so on the web or not, there was just not a dark majority of LCDs out there, they had not been made in sufficient quantity until the 2000s.