VOGONS


First post, by PhantomONC

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I don't know if this belongs here because it's a laptop, but I present to you, my ThinkPad T22!

- Pentium III 900MHz
- 256MB RAM
- 30GB IDE Hard Drive
- S3 Savage/IX (8MB) GPU
- 1440x1050 display
- DVD-ROM
- Windows 98 Second Edition

While this laptop is circa 2000, I'm mostly playing older games from 1999 and older. The goal was to be my "interim DOS machine" that would run DOS games until I get an older machine. As I'm a newbie to retro PC collecting, I decided to start with a well-equipped laptop, and this is it. It runs Windows games (like UT, Quake III, Quake II, and HL/TF Classic) all extremely well even at 1024x768 (in OpenGL, Direct3D, and MeTaL where applicable, I tested HL/TF Classic in D3D only, UT in D3D and MeTaL, and Quake II/III in OpenGL), but also DOS games like Duke3D, Doom, and Wolf3D. Starcraft is coming as a Windows game, and The 8-Bit Guy's Planet X3 once that comes out.

I noticed that in Windows mode, DOS games have sound (likely due to Windows providing SoundBlaster emulation to the DOS VDMs) but in actual DOS mode, there is no sound, as they can't detect the sound card.

The battery still holds a charge somehow!

BTW, I installed 98lite on there with the Windows 95 shell to speed things up a bit.

On a final note, on the remarkable circumstances in which I acquired it, my friend's dad. He had a bunch of old computers and he let me pick one, me being me, I chose this. It had Windows 2000 Professional on it, but I wiped that to install Windows 98SE instead.

Reply 1 of 7, by oeuvre

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Awesome! Old ThinkPads are tanks and excellent retro gaming laptops. If yours suffers from sticky rubberized coating, a magic eraser will work wonders for that. Enjoy.

HP Z420 Workstation Intel Xeon E5-1620, 32GB, RADEON HD7850 2GB, SSD + HD, XP/7
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Reply 2 of 7, by PhantomONC

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oeuvre wrote:

Awesome! Old ThinkPads are tanks and excellent retro gaming laptops. If yours suffers from sticky rubberized coating, a magic eraser will work wonders for that. Enjoy.

Thanks man! No sticky coating, though. What I did find was dust in the sandpaper trackpoint, skin from the previous owner, who was a heavy user of the laptop for at least a couple years.

Reply 4 of 7, by PhantomONC

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Baoran wrote:

I also have Thinkpad T22. I think the sound worked in dos mode for me though as long as I had set the resources correctly.

Oh, I see. The issue for me is that I can't find drivers for the Crystal sound card. I don't know if I should use regular SoundBlaster drivers, or if there are drivers for the sound chip.

Reply 6 of 7, by leileilol

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I think the Savage would make it more of a nightmare machine. just a hunch

(it's not just 3d that laptop savages skimp on. Sometimes they're really slow with overlays)

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long live PCem