stelth wrote on 2019-12-15, 00:52:

My current retrogaming laptop is a Dell Latitude XPi CD M166st Year: 1996 Processor :Pentium MMX 166 RAM: 32MB HDD: 1.5GB Audio […]
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My current retrogaming laptop is a Dell Latitude XPi CD M166st
Year: 1996
Processor :Pentium MMX 166
RAM: 32MB
HDD: 1.5GB
Audio : ESS 1887,ESS 690 wavetable music synthesizer
Video controller: NeoMagic 2093 LCD
Dimensions (active area): 800X600
Height . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184.5 mm (7.26 inches)
Width . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246.0 mm (9.68 inches)
Operating System: Windows 95 OSR2 version B
Games installed:
Duke Nukem 3D 1.5 Version + Nuclear Winter
Quake
Doom 95
Abe Oddysee
Mah Jongg Solitaire 1.1
Dxball

It's a good little laptop,it seems big but it's actually pretty small,perhaps it loads a lot of DOS Games ,it has a nice MIDI Synthesizer,unfortunately it doesn't have a good video codec,it's a little bit slow when you try to load a mpeg video like weezer etc..otherwise it boots up fast and does a lot of stuff for a 1996 laptop.

UPDATED photos

*FIXED* Wallpaper bug (had runonce.exe in regedit's Run,i deleted it because it won't change my desktop before)

Tomb Raider (1996) installed,runs good
BLOOD (1997) Installed,runs good
SONIC CD (1996) Installed,runs good
Half Life(1998) tried to install it but it runs so slow and keeps 400mb of my 1.5gb HDD)
Quake 2 (1997) Installed,runs good
Microsoft Intellipoint 1.1 (1996) Installed

stelth wrote on 2020-01-11, 14:47:

Quake 2 (1997) Installed,runs good

Software render mode I guess?

SpectriaForce wrote on 2020-01-11, 20:53:

stelth wrote on 2020-01-11, 14:47:

Quake 2 (1997) Installed,runs good

Software render mode I guess?

yup with 320x240

Here is mine, it's a Toshiba Satellite 1640CDT.

AMD K6-2+ 475MHz
192 MB RAM
ATI Rage LT Pro
Crystal 4281
6GB HDD

Great machine, only downside is sound card is Crystal 4281 PCI so it "kind of" works in MS-DOS.

Khorne wrote on 2020-10-08, 17:31:

Here is mine, it's a Toshiba Satellite 1640CDT. […]
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Here is mine, it's a Toshiba Satellite 1640CDT.

01.jpg

AMD K6-2+ 475MHz
192 MB RAM
ATI Rage LT Pro
Crystal 4281
6GB HDD

Great machine, only downside is sound card is Crystal 4281 PCI so it "kind of" works in MS-DOS.

Yeah, but it's a K6-2+, so setmul throttling "totally" works in MS-DOS, which I consider to be a worthy trade-off for old-school gaming. It's not like the CS4281 is terrible (I've definitely heard worse).

But of course, that K6-2+ and setmul are the reason I got it 😀

Samsung Sens Pro 520 is pretty good laptop for Dos gaming, only one bad side is no screen stretch for 640x480 or lower. SB with small TSR.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung-Laptop-Sens- … 20/164239914069

MAZter wrote on 2020-10-12, 12:58:

Samsung Sens Pro 520 is pretty good laptop for Dos gaming, only one bad side is no screen stretch for 640x480 or lower. SB with small TSR.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung-Laptop-Sens- … 4069s-l1600.jpg

So what makes this machine “pretty good” for DOS gaming?

I have two DOS/Windows gaming laptops:

Siemens Scenic Mobile 710, 12" TFT 800x600 with Pentium MMX 266:
http://computermuseum.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/cat.p … 32&type=Laptops

IBM Thinkpad 380Z, 13" TFT 1024x768 with Pentium II 233:
https://www.cnet.com/products/ibm-thinkpad-38 … -gb-hdd-series/

I like the IBM better. LCD is better and video can be stretched to fill the screen. CPU is powerfull enought to play Quake2 in software mode - I actually played it for some hours last month.

The only downside is their bulky size.

I’ve been playing around with a ThinkPad T42 (circa late 2004) lately. This one has a 2.0 GHz Pentium M with 768MB of DDR RAM, a 14” TFT display, a Radeon Mobility 9000 (64MB), a 128GB mSATA SSD, and a DVD-ROM drive.

It would make a good Windows 98/XP gaming system, but the Mobility 9000 (DirectX 8.1) will hold it back from playing a lot of late Windows XP games well.

But when mated to a ThinkPad Dock II hosting a PCI sound card, it becomes a neat little DOS gaming system. I’ve got an Aureal Vortex 1 with a Dreamblaster S2 wavetable card in it right now for some sweet, sweet MIDI tunes.

The BIOS on the motherboard isn’t that great, so I’m still working though some memory and resource allocation issues. It isn’t perfect, but I’ve had a lot of success with DOS games so far.

I still have my first ever gaming laptop Acer Ferrari 4005wlmi in my storage. It is a windows XP laptop with Athlon64 Turion ML-37 cpu, Ati mobility radeon x700 and 2GB of ram. Been thinking lately if it might have some kind of retro purpose some day. If you could install win98 on it, perhaps it might be useful, but not sure what chipset it has and if the chipset would have win98 drivers.

I guess with the pretty pictures and some changes since my first post in this thread, I'll post my 4 gaming laptops - new and vintage - here, as they overlap....

1994 NEC Versa 40EC

i486 DX2-40, 8MB of RAM, 540MB HDD, MS-DOS 5.00/Windows For Workgroups 3.11
This picture was taken when I got the battery working for awhile by zapping the ever mother living heck out of it with a car charger for a second. This was my gaming laptop last year and up until July of this year when I bought the M/75. It's h ad to have the screen JB welded back together several times, at this point it should be solid enough, but it also needs a screen replacement, and the charge board has some issues (I think a fuse blew when the last battery blew up).

1994 NEC Versa M/75

i486 DX4-75, 24MB of RAM, 80GB Seagate EIDE HDD, FreeDOS 2.1, experiments with WSS and Windows 3.1 aboud
This is actually my personal favorite. It's the Ex-System 2000 AAC machine. Still waiting for a digitizer that will fit to turn up (10.4" with 9.4" viewable area) so I can have it be touch enabled as well. It's almost as beat up as the 40EC but it's my personal favorite. I took the battery (which still works and has one hour of life per charge, it's also much newer than the other two batteries I have that fit this one) from the P/75 and put it in this one and now I have a 2 hour long fully portable DOS gaming rig with WiFi and internet access (via my phone). Yeah, it's ugly, the plastic's cracked, it's got "character". But it's a happy little beast for a almost 30 year old laptop. I'm dabbling with WSS on it right now to create sort of an "on-demand" driver for the WSS. the P/75 sucks down battery life compared to this being a Pentium and all hence why this is my favorite, plus I don't need sound THAT much, and some games like Links 386 and Freddy Pharkas have the WSS driver for DOS built in. I've taken this thing to work to do serious work with it before and it was a good little champ. If I get the sound thing done and figure out e-mail, I might have a killer little retro-modern open-sourced tweener portable workstation on my hands.

1995 NEC Versa P/75

I bought this for the Windows 95/98 games and it runs another Seagate Momentous 80GB like the Versa M/75 above. The pros above the M/75 is this has an 800x600 LCD panel, and ESS 688 sound, but it also sucks down batteries like a maniac compared to the SLC 486 DX4 above, and the battery falls out due to a bad latch spring, as well as the CMOS battery is funky and I tried using a CR2302 but it stopped working in 2 days, needs a CR2450. Also the ESS conflicts with the soundblaster when Docked....but ya' know. Also having Windows 95 makes it a little less usable on the web compared to my M/75, and it really does not show THAT much of a performance boost over the 486 at the same speed that I'm sort of like...uh....what's the point.

Plus all three Versa share the same Docking station, an AT&T branded version of the Versa Dock II. I built a custom wood top for it. I found out I can add a HDD to the dock, I'm tempted to make a FreeDOS bootable docking station that has all the drivers for all three and the others on it so I could possibly start rebuilding and reselling Versa 486's if I can find a way to make a tiny profit from it.

2012 Lenovo T61

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz, 4GB of RAM, 250GB SSD, DVD-RW, NVIDIA Graphics, Sound. This thing is a beast that's actually my "run anything" laptop. It runs PC, Mac, DOS, Windows, Android, and emulated consoles with ease. It runs Linux Mint 20 and screams. It's also my main laptop in general. I also have Steam setup on it to run what it can (Postal 2, Thimbleweed Park, FNaF 1-UCN, etc) using some emulator thing they offer if you put the app in beta mode.

Great thread and great recommendations.

I just got back into the retro world and will comment on my machines.

I picked up a Toshiba Tecra 8000 + Satellite 490XCDT locally recently.

BOTH are equivalent machines..... P2-266 + 13.3" TFT Screens @ 1024x768. There is screen stretching built in (not great) but the nice part is that they have 1x USB, CD-ROM and PCMCIA which make them easy to move data on/off of.

The sound cards are true Yamaha OPL3 chips so seem to work well.

They are odd ducks as I'm not sure why Toshiba released systems with such close specs. (only difference I see is that the Ram went from EDO => SDram PC66).

However, the combination of sound support with modern features is good. I haven't tried gaming on them but they are probably too fast for early dos gaming.

I also made the mistake of picking up a Compaq LTE Elite 486 = 4/50cx. The machine is in fair condition (6/10) for the age but the hard drive flex cable is slightly torn so it makes me nervous to work on it. The floppies on all the Compaq LTE machines have self-destructed with the cable laxity problem and the previous owner completely butchered the old drive in trying to repair it.

This was also my folly as I drove 4+ hours round trip to pick it up. Dumb move on my part (I didn't check the weather/hoped it wouldn't really snow so was stuck in traffic).

FINALLY, I stumbled upon a Zeos Pocket PC. Cute 8088 toy with monochrome screen. Not gameable really but amazing for the era.

kleung21 wrote on 2021-02-21, 14:28:

Great thread and great recommendations. […]
Show full quote

Great thread and great recommendations.

I just got back into the retro world and will comment on my machines.

I picked up a Toshiba Tecra 8000 + Satellite 490XCDT locally recently.

BOTH are equivalent machines..... P2-266 + 13.3" TFT Screens @ 1024x768. There is screen stretching built in (not great) but the nice part is that they have 1x USB, CD-ROM and PCMCIA which make them easy to move data on/off of.

The sound cards are true Yamaha OPL3 chips so seem to work well.

They are odd ducks as I'm not sure why Toshiba released systems with such close specs. (only difference I see is that the Ram went from EDO => SDram PC66).

However, the combination of sound support with modern features is good. I haven't tried gaming on them but they are probably too fast for early dos gaming.

I also made the mistake of picking up a Compaq LTE Elite 486 = 4/50cx. The machine is in fair condition (6/10) for the age but the hard drive flex cable is slightly torn so it makes me nervous to work on it. The floppies on all the Compaq LTE machines have self-destructed with the cable laxity problem and the previous owner completely butchered the old drive in trying to repair it.

This was also my folly as I drove 4+ hours round trip to pick it up. Dumb move on my part (I didn't check the weather/hoped it wouldn't really snow so was stuck in traffic).

FINALLY, I stumbled upon a Zeos Pocket PC. Cute 8088 toy with monochrome screen. Not gameable really but amazing for the era.

The Tecra 8K and the Sat490XCDT are not entirely the same, not when you compare the Tecra 8K to the Portege 7020CT (which has very similar specs - similar CPU, chipset, architecture, GPU and the same YMF719 audio setup). As you would've pointed out, the Sat490XCDT is EDO based and have a S3 VirgeMX, while the Tecra is PC66/100 SDRAM with a Neomagic 2200. If I remember correctly the CPU on the Tecra 8Ks are upgradeable via MMC-1 modules all the way to a PII 400MHz/ Celeron 466Mhz (if it's cheap, go for it). Why were they similar? Same internal design team, and the parts are probably sourced in a large group - Japanese firms back in the days do not generally hire out designs, like what Dell used to do with Wistron or Quanta, so they had some consistency across their lines.

If you consider a 440 chipset based laptop, I would advise against EDO since it's a little slower, and EDO SODIMMs are much more expensive than the 66/100/133MHz SDRAM SODIMMs out there. When it came to the fragile flex cables, yeah, I ran into something similar with the one on my Thinkpad 560E. I simply reinforce it with good old 3M transparent packing tape. Just wrap it around the ribbon and it should be a little more resilient.

As for floppy drives - does it use the normal 34 pin, or the TEAC 26 pin FFC? If it's FFC26 you might be able to source a TEAC direct drive mechanism to replace the belt driven drives.

As for clocking back for the old stuff, well...as long as your games are not the Wing Commander/Test Drive III type that are overly twitchy on PIIs, or the games that have timing issues that crash on faster machines (i.e. the original Monkey Island) it'll do fine (and throttle/cpuspd works to slow them down...sometimes).

ragefury32 wrote on 2021-02-21, 21:31:

The Tecra 8K and the Sat490XCDT are not entirely the same, not when you compare the Tecra 8K to the Portege 7020CT (which has ve […]
Show full quote

kleung21 wrote on 2021-02-21, 14:28:

Great thread and great recommendations. […]
Show full quote

Great thread and great recommendations.

I just got back into the retro world and will comment on my machines.

I picked up a Toshiba Tecra 8000 + Satellite 490XCDT locally recently.

BOTH are equivalent machines..... P2-266 + 13.3" TFT Screens @ 1024x768. There is screen stretching built in (not great) but the nice part is that they have 1x USB, CD-ROM and PCMCIA which make them easy to move data on/off of.

The sound cards are true Yamaha OPL3 chips so seem to work well.

They are odd ducks as I'm not sure why Toshiba released systems with such close specs. (only difference I see is that the Ram went from EDO => SDram PC66).

However, the combination of sound support with modern features is good. I haven't tried gaming on them but they are probably too fast for early dos gaming.

I also made the mistake of picking up a Compaq LTE Elite 486 = 4/50cx. The machine is in fair condition (6/10) for the age but the hard drive flex cable is slightly torn so it makes me nervous to work on it. The floppies on all the Compaq LTE machines have self-destructed with the cable laxity problem and the previous owner completely butchered the old drive in trying to repair it.

This was also my folly as I drove 4+ hours round trip to pick it up. Dumb move on my part (I didn't check the weather/hoped it wouldn't really snow so was stuck in traffic).

FINALLY, I stumbled upon a Zeos Pocket PC. Cute 8088 toy with monochrome screen. Not gameable really but amazing for the era.

The Tecra 8K and the Sat490XCDT are not entirely the same, not when you compare the Tecra 8K to the Portege 7020CT (which has very similar specs - similar CPU, chipset, architecture, GPU and the same YMF719 audio setup). As you would've pointed out, the Sat490XCDT is EDO based and have a S3 VirgeMX, while the Tecra is PC66/100 SDRAM with a Neomagic 2200. If I remember correctly the CPU on the Tecra 8Ks are upgradeable via MMC-1 modules all the way to a PII 400MHz/ Celeron 466Mhz (if it's cheap, go for it). Why were they similar? Same internal design team, and the parts are probably sourced in a large group - Japanese firms back in the days do not generally hire out designs, like what Dell used to do with Wistron or Quanta, so they had some consistency across their lines.

If you consider a 440 chipset based laptop, I would advise against EDO since it's a little slower, and EDO SODIMMs are much more expensive than the 66/100/133MHz SDRAM SODIMMs out there. When it came to the fragile flex cables, yeah, I ran into something similar with the one on my Thinkpad 560E. I simply reinforce it with good old 3M transparent packing tape. Just wrap it around the ribbon and it should be a little more resilient.

As for floppy drives - does it use the normal 34 pin, or the TEAC 26 pin FFC? If it's FFC26 you might be able to source a TEAC direct drive mechanism to replace the belt driven drives.

As for clocking back for the old stuff, well...as long as your games are not the Wing Commander/Test Drive III type that are overly twitchy on PIIs, or the games that have timing issues that crash on faster machines (i.e. the original Monkey Island) it'll do fine (and throttle/cpuspd works to slow them down...sometimes).

Thank you for all the comments. I'm really enjoying reliving my youth/childhood through retro-computing so it's been a real blast. I first tried my hand in it about a decade ago (picked up a LOT of XT-386 level machines back then) but didn't have time to service it all and eventually sold them to another collector for cheap. That was the era of big desktops!).

Now, I've decided to acquire a range of laptops just for ease of storage. But I'm finding that many (all) of the truly older machines are having hardware issues. Bad SODIMM sockets, CMOS replacement etc...

So, I've got a bunch that I have to refurbish. But, some real interesting hardware out there now.

Watch out for the CMOS batteries in those mid 90s laptops, I found even the Toshiba Tecra 8000 can be ruined by a bad CMOS battery, which sits somewhere under the palm-rest. You have to dismantle the whole thing to get at it. Personally I just remove them and treat the area. So many of my Toshibas have been ruined by bad CMOS / standby batteries 🙁 I recommend doing it sooner than later, it's getting to a point within the last few years that most are now being damaged by the batteries. I got a Libretto 70CT but it's only sort-of working thanks to the CMOS battery, and my Libretto 100CT was completely dead thanks to corrosion.
The older computers, like 386s are also affected, but the PCB density & complexity on laptops makes them really tough to fix, I can usually get 386/486 boards working with some solder bridges and jumper wires, but if a laptop's corroded, that's usually it.

My 410CDT Satellite Pro had the dreaded Ni-MH CMOS and Wake batteries. I put in the 3V rechargeable coin cell from the broken T4800CT in the 410CDT and it works without issues for the CMOS. The wake battery is a suggestion.

OK.... I've finally had a chance to finish basic refub to my stable of laptops..... Removed cmos batteries... Swapped in CF-IDE, M2/sata-ide, 2.5"ide-3.5"ide adapters in all of them so they are quiet (the old drives are intolerable for me).

As recommended here, I have removed all rechargable CMOS batteries from older laptops that dont' require it to boot.

I know someone else mentioned it one of the other threads, but the BIOS for the Tecra8000 and the 490xcdt have some really great functions for dos gaming.

BIOS supports
1) Screen scaling (double size)... It's ugly, but at least it stretches out to full screen..

2) BIOS supports "slow" mode for power savings. My understanding is that it will half the speed of the CPU. In my case, the P2-266 goes to around 133 which is great.

3) SetMUL program allows you to turn off the L1/L2 caches for additional slowdown. Using the old Landmark 2.0 benchmark, it shows the following speeds.

(LM2.0 compares vs. an IBM AT)

Vintage computing Notes

Benchmarks using bios speed settings.

Tecra 490xcdt (p2-266 w/ 64mb edo ram)
Full speed 168 mhz AT / 45 Coprocessor = P2-266 speed
Full speed / L1 off 17 / 7 = 386sx-16 speed

Low speed 84 / 23 = Pentium 150 speed
Low speed / L1 off 9 / 36 = 286 speed

For some reason... Disabling l2 cache does not seem to show up in the landmark or the norton SI benchmarks of this era.

Anyways, this means that the Toshiba laptop series are GREAT for simulating dos computer speeds from IBM AT-9, 386sx-16, pentium 150, pentium2-266 Which is a far cry more useful than I originally thought.

I haven't experimented with my dell or compaq systems yet. Do they also have bios slowdown options in them?

kleung21 wrote on 2021-03-06, 22:47:

OK.... I've finally had a chance to finish basic refub to my stable of laptops..... Removed cmos batteries... Swapped in CF-IDE, […]
Show full quote

OK.... I've finally had a chance to finish basic refub to my stable of laptops..... Removed cmos batteries... Swapped in CF-IDE, M2/sata-ide, 2.5"ide-3.5"ide adapters in all of them so they are quiet (the old drives are intolerable for me).

As recommended here, I have removed all rechargable CMOS batteries from older laptops that dont' require it to boot.

I know someone else mentioned it one of the other threads, but the BIOS for the Tecra8000 and the 490xcdt have some really great functions for dos gaming.

BIOS supports
1) Screen scaling (double size)... It's ugly, but at least it stretches out to full screen..

2) BIOS supports "slow" mode for power savings. My understanding is that it will half the speed of the CPU. In my case, the P2-266 goes to around 133 which is great.

3) SetMUL program allows you to turn off the L1/L2 caches for additional slowdown. Using the old Landmark 2.0 benchmark, it shows the following speeds.

(LM2.0 compares vs. an IBM AT)

Vintage computing Notes

Benchmarks using bios speed settings.

Tecra 490xcdt (p2-266 w/ 64mb edo ram)
Full speed 168 mhz AT / 45 Coprocessor = P2-266 speed
Full speed / L1 off 17 / 7 = 386sx-16 speed

Low speed 84 / 23 = Pentium 150 speed
Low speed / L1 off 9 / 36 = 286 speed

For some reason... Disabling l2 cache does not seem to show up in the landmark or the norton SI benchmarks of this era.

Anyways, this means that the Toshiba laptop series are GREAT for simulating dos computer speeds from IBM AT-9, 386sx-16, pentium 150, pentium2-266 Which is a far cry more useful than I originally thought.

I haven't experimented with my dell or compaq systems yet. Do they also have bios slowdown options in them?

Actually, if you have a later Toshiba you'll realize that their BIOS options are actually a bit more limiting versus, say, its Dell or IBM cousins - this is more pertaining to, say, disabling onboard sound/USB or other accessories (which you might need if your sound chip is a PCI model that uses southbridge features to give you DOS compatibility). The clock-down option also does not exist if you go to, say, a P3/p3m based model or above.

As for clocking them down, look into cpuspd instead of setmul. Cpuspd actually have a throttling command that gives you the ability to run your machine in 8 throttle increments on most P2/Mobile P3 machines. That can open up more gaming options.

Great thread. Super informative and thank you building an exhaustive list and for everyone chiming in 😀