SteveC wrote on 2021-02-01, 18:18:So these turned up today and both work but have failed hard drives. So annoying though as you can't boot off USB and I don't hav […]
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SteveC wrote on 2021-01-23, 22:37:
Just bought a pair of Toshiba Portege laptops to make a 2 player Win98 gaming setup 😀 Both working just need hard drives according to the seller, easily sorted. Don't think £34 delivered for the pair was too bad.
So these turned up today and both work but have failed hard drives. So annoying though as you can't boot off USB and I don't have the dock to get the RJ45 port for ethernet and I don't have the custom connector floppy drive so I can't boot off floppy! Have to prepare a drive in another PC and move it over, taking the laptop to pieces in the process.
Nice little laptops though - should make nice Windows 98 machines to play with - 2 player over irDA haha. PII 300Mhz with 128Mb might struggle under XP, and 2000 might be a bit restrictive on gaming.
edit - just working on the second laptop and the hard drive is fine, just partitioned (into win98 and win2k labelled partitions), wiped and looks like someone forgot to make a partition active or put boot files on it. I bet they didn't any method of installing Windows either so gave up!
Yeah, that's a common affliction of old subnotebooks - they generally do not boot off USB1.1 - not that USB1 is great for booting ISOs anyways. If you got a Toshiba external drive + cable, it might use the TEAC FFC26 interface. If it does, you can mod yourself a nice little mini-Gotek for those machines.
If you are lucky you got a pair of Portege 7010CT - the Neomagic 256AV is an okay 2D-only chip (although gona.mactar.hu and its DOS compatibility table will disagree). The real winner here is the legit OPL3-SA3 audio (YMF725 if I remember correctly). If I am gunning for a PII class subnotebook the 7010CT and the ThinkPad 240(ESFM Solo-1) will be my choices.
If you are not so lucky? You might end up with a pair of Portege 3110CTs. You'll want to look up how to configure the ESS Maestro 2 (ES1978) for DOS if you plan to use it there...it's not that straightforward. The Maestro 2 is a decent Windows AC97 chip but not well regarded in DOS. Keep expectations low for the Trident Cyber9525 video chip onboard - use it as a 2D card (it'll do fine and compatibility should be good) and ignore whatever Direct3D hardware acceleration it claims to have. It's based on the Trident 3DImage family, essentially a 3DImage 975 but with less VRAM - let's just say that there are generally more respect for the S3 Virge MX than this one - if it's not slow in Direct3D then it's glitchy as hell -> https://vintage3d.org/trident.php
Yeah, I know. Why can't Toshiba make a small machine with the Trident Cyber9525 and the YMF725F on the SAME CHASSIS? It would at least be a decent little laptop for late DOS/Early Windows...