In this episode, I walk you through the pros and cons of many laptops from the 1980's and 1990's and show some of the differences. Visit me on Facebook: / the8bitguy
I would love to see an update on this - I feel prices on this vintage stuff have gone out of sight lately. That same Compaq he won for $25 is now $100+
That's just the thing with all this retro stuff - everybody looks up the same people on RU-vid, and unless you're already "in the know" from reading forums or Reddit or something to get to the stuff early, as soon as a video like this is posted the prices go way up. Simillar thing happened to the gameboy collecting - you can see people from ~5 years ago uploading videos of restoring "$5 junk gameboy" with ebay screeshots and all that - well, good luck finding a broken rusty piece of crap of a gameboy for less than 40 bucks nowadays. I am not complaining, though, since restoring a couple of those brought me a lot of enjoyment, just that since I was late to the party as well (being oneof those who learned about gameboy repairs on the RU-vid) I noticed the same thing that these vintage electronics are nowhere near as cheap as they were 5-10 years ago due to all the info available on them in a convenient form of a short and concise vdeo.
14:54 i remember this game ( the frog crossing the street ) when i was in first or second grade at my school in Saudi Arabia. It was very rear seeing a pc back days and crazy thing to use one
that era was special, no grandmother, and parents could play it, and it was basicaly first generation, that could have computer at home, and play at least something. It was cool to watch even pixelated games, it was like miracle, because you knew, that all people that lived 10 years ago, never in their lives could play any computer games. And also, only nerds did it, as it was superexpensive. It had special magic. So it's only interesting for people, that lived through 80's and early 90's, because they remember that atmosphere, that ms-dos games had. For all rest, dos box is enough.
I distinctly remember running a DOS clock limiter that throttled the CPU cycles on old hardware. I had to make use of these to enjoy all the stuff I had on my 8086, once I upgraded to my 486DX40 (quite a leap at the time).
theres something about these videos - I end up watching them full because I don't know the pacing is perfect or your voice is perfect for this subject. in any case, awesome job. keep em coming
My idea of an old gaming portable right now is the backlit Game Boy Advance. I spent too much time already gaming on old laptops (one 486 and one Pentium MMX)
The older dos games what run too quickly, you can use a tool such as SLOWDOS or MOSLO and they will steal CPU cycles, making the game play at a decent speed. - also SLOWDOS and MOSLO work both on proper hardware and DOSbox Emulation as well
Me: I love old retro games! :D 8-Bit Guy: You'll need this and this and this. This might not work and this might not work. This and this and this. Me: :c ...Maybe I'll just watch you play instead.
Desktops Good: Easier to work on Bad: Too big and bulky and too heavy Laptops Good: Portable and small and easy to carry Bad: Harder to work on, find drivers for, or find parts for.
Laptops are good for overseas people with freight forwarders, shipping costs aren't way too high, 486/early Pentium desktop PCs are extremely expensive for shipping.
+Plague470 That's like me and parrot videos. RU-vid lets me enjoy adorable birds with bright colors, neat tricks and cute antics without the huge amount of effort it takes to raise one.
+Plague470 Yeah me too. I just subbed recently. He is very good at making videos. I don't really care for the topic but I end up watching the whole thing.
I use DOSBox for playing my old games. What I find interesting is that on some games, I still can't get past the same level I couldn't get past 15 years ago. I guess I'm a terrible gamer.
Thanks for producing this video 8bitguy. I liked how you explained the principles of getting the right type of TFT screen with 640x480 resolution, and get a sound blaster card in the laptop. Applying your principles, I picked the Panasonic CF-41 Toughbook. Mine is a pentium 90 with a 640x480 TFT screen and ESS audiodrive soundblaster.
10:56 YES, very yes!!! I have like 12 oldschool systems, but by far my favorite for DOS retro gaming is my Toshiba 400cdt. If you're wanting to get into DOS retro but you don't yet have your first system, hold out for this one and pay the extra for it if needed, it's worth it.
I can't thank you enough for this wonderful video. You took me back literally 25 years or more and I thank you for that. I can only try to imagine the kind of efforts and preparation it took you to shoot a 16 minutes video. High respect.👍👌🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Pentium II and III laptops can actually be very good for later DOS gaming, just that not all work equally as well. A great machine I used to have was the Toshiba Satellite 4070CDT: it had a good ESS Maestro that was SB Pro compatible, and a 366MHz Celeron CPU. Sadly that died, and my M700 366MHz PII-PE had some weird DMA issues despite using the same sound chip! Upgraded it to a 650MHz PIII motherboard, and the sound worked again, and the GPU had a *much* better scaler (an ATi Rage Moblity)!
This brought a lot of memories, from the first time that I took a computer class on msdos, we used floppy 5 1/4 disks, I had my whole ms dos os, lotus and a text editor there, that was on the late 90s by the way, a lot of technology gap back then.
This video litterally motivated me to search and restore some old laptops for my beloved Dos games an I have watched it just so many times! I'm currently building up some old pentium 1 and 2 laptops for dos/early windows gaming and aside from the Hardware point of view: Is it important which version of Dos is used? Are there some compatibility issues or one version overall more compatible than an other one?
These Laptops are really hard to find nowadays. It took my almost two years to get both the Compaq LTE 5000 and Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT in perfect condition. But it's so worth it for classic DOS adventures and other games!
I got lucky and got given 3 satellite pro 430cdts, and a couple of the external floppy drives, only 1 worked but it worked perfectly and I still have it , scrapped the others for spare parts , the battery even works still
There's an easy fix for the games that run to fast. I've once written a payload back in the days, it was in pure assembly and basically hooked itself to timer interrupt 1Ch. Once it activated it introduced a loop in the timer interrupt causing the pc to slow down. The amount of slowdown could be controlled by the amount of looping in the ISR. It's pretty easy to write such a routine in assembly and if you also hook in to INT16h (keyboard) you could control the delay with the keyboard whilst being in the game. It wouldn't interfere with the game as it was a TSR program that ran in the background.
StrixNoctis Although you're right I've never encountered such a game. It's also bad practice to not jump to the original ISR code and could cause all kinds of issues depending on the hooked interrupt. But you probably know that already. ☺️
There were some PCMCIA sound cards with AdLib/Sound Blaster compatibility, but they were rare and expensive when new, and thus virtually impossible to find today, especially with the required audio cable dongle.
We used to be playing Duke3d all days, over 20yrs ago. No one had a laptop that time, thus one of us had to carry his desktop + monitor. Sessions were amazing, it was a great time... Thanks!
I have to correct a few misconceptions that you have in this video. I am a semi expert on Commodore hardware. 1. NO WEB CONNECTION/WEB BROWSER: There is indeed Three ways to get the Commodore machine on the internet... most of these methods also work with other period hardware, including your old dos machine (just use your rs232 port connected to a rs232/tcip wrapper server, i use a rasberry pi b+ for this) The commodore can use a plug in cart that give the Commodore network connectivity, a plug in cart to add rs232 port to the computer and connect to the above mentioned, a diy user port expansion for rs232 for less that 4 dollars, and an actual wireless network device that plugs into the user port.. In fact, there is a version of Java that also runs on this hardware. Three web browsers exist, and also two web servers also. You can also connect to irc and tweet with no problems! 2. STORAGE SOLUTIONS: Sd card solutions exist as well as modern hard drive solutions *max atm 25 gig storage. The Commodore 1581 3.5" floppy predates others, released 1985. At 700k storage and using fast load routines it can load most games in under a minute. 3. OPERATING SYSTEMS: Cp/m opensource (before being ripped off by Micro$oft and patented (pre 1977) ,GEOS berkley softworks (once again micro$oft sued to keep it tied up in courts while the patent ran out and then filed for the patent themselves, putting the company out of business , wonder where micro$oft got there windows 1.0 framework from huh LOL ), Conqui (a modern graphical os that runs entirely in ram, with email web browser, word processor, database out of the box), CLunix (Commodore based lunux solution) 4. ADD ONS: FPGA plug in cart makes emulating any hardware a breeze such as memory expansion, z80 add on for cp/m, super cpu, even transforming the machine into entire other hardware, such as atari 800 or amiga 1000 using the commodore hardware as a frontend. Connecting to any modern tv via svideo is also supported right out of the box on original hardware, or using the fpga vga port. While were on the subject, if you knew anything about the atari 2600 hardware you held in your hand you would know that by simply opening the box and soldering 3 wires you can connect it up to a modern tv via s video, or if your tv doesn't support svideo, get a amazon/ebay converter for 10 bucks.. Some of your assumptions on storage methods are misguided, others are just outright incorrect. In this era, simply boosting the drive capacity was enough that old disks would not read/write in a new drive. Other manufactures, such as commodore, took to reading there disks then processing the data through a rom lookup decode table to expand drive space by dropping the last bit of the byte stored *and a reason commodore drives were slower than there simular counterparts. Others, like apple, in the same time period, had generally a lower storage space because they did not employ such methods until much later, and read there disks in reverse to commodore, thus they were generally faster. In this time frame it was very common to see a double sided disk with commodore on one side and apple/dos on the other. Same disk. On today's hardware, I can read and write commodore formatted disks in my windows 10 machine with a 5.25" floppy drive (and before you say it, yes i know this is suppose to be impossible also, LOL). I can even use the hard drive on my windows computer and load commodore games directly to the box and play them via network. To the commodore, it thinks it is just another cmd hard drive Also, you can simply connect the Commodore drive to a breakout board using the original i2c bus, using a level shifter with a ftdi chip, and connect via usb if you wanted to, or use the printer port and connect directly to the drive. You just have to know what you are doing. Use a backpack 3.5 " drive connected to your dos machine's printer port and those low capacity disks suddenly become read/writable once again. I do have a winbook (cant have any idea why you didnt suggest this one) for dos games when I feel the need to drag it out of its resting place in the closet. Some purest scene guys would argue that new hardware produced for vintage systems is not vintage hardware. I contend that if it runs on the vintage hardware, it is vintage hardware. The commodore scene has expanded at a very rapid pace over the last few years, and the hardware options have exploded. You just have to know where to look. Hopefully that cleared up a few things. Thanks
Really great information, as always! I usually see the retro gamers with desktop computers, but as someone who has limited space, I appreciate that you went into laptops. I myself use DosBOX for convenience though...
14:54 - As a programmer who works on hardware too (I mean who don't?) I'm not asking if it was possible to underclock the CPU, but how hard it was those days to do it? I'm not a retro lover so didn't have an interest to examine those older bios but no doubt it wasn't a number one feature to include, and not even talking about memory limitations on those chips. Or if I'm wrong, would lower clock affect any other part of the game or games and the whole system except... lower clock...
Probably very diffcult, requiring modifying the motherboard. Some cases the BIOS had options to lower the CPU frequency to around half to get better battery life, but that will only go so far.
I just found your channel. This is very nostalgic as I'm 47, so grew I up on this stuff. I was a lucky kid as I had a Commodore SX-64 "executive" as my first computer, after an Atari 2600. It was heavy but I could haul it anywhere. I was 12 then. Anyway, my point of commenting was that I used to work for a company when they could no longer obtain hard drives for their legacy products other than the 20 and 40 GB drives as you showed. For the life of me, I can't remember what it was the process was called but used a low-level format that turned the drive into an 8GB drive. It was one way and you could not go back. The drive would permanently be an 8GB drive. That is an option for replacing those old hard drives.
I can't agree with all points mentioned in this video... 1. There existed some 386/486 laptops with sound cards, sometimes with rather exotic chips though. Some also support manual CPU settings (e.g for old games with hardcoded speed). 2. Some of the Pentium laptops offered various sound card emulations as BIOS setting, also screen scaling can be sometimes set manually there. 3. Proper CF cards don't wear out quickly, I personally use SLC based cards like the Transcend Industiral CF200I, Win98 is spamming a lot of data on it by filling the virtual memory and its showing still no issues. Those cards support SMART and emulate IDE properly. 4. Lot of old laptops do support rather large drives if you set the size (sectors, heads...) manually in BIOS. 5. There are various ways to connect to your LAN even if there is no PCMCIA slot in the laptop, also many DOS apps support proper networking. I like the part where you show that the serial port can be used to transfer data and play games with/against each other, even games like Age of Empires 2 (1999) still supported it. And I also like the part where you show that the printer port can be used to connect a sound card, many ppl nowadays don't know what kind of magic can be done with that good old port.
Also, dosbox can be used to do null modem connection over lan. also, if you disable l1 cache on a pentium it will run at 486 speed, if you disable l1 and l2 it will run at an almost 386/286 speed, fixing the speed issues.
Great video! I think i'm going to buy a new MS DOS laptop to replace my old IBM, it's pretty cool but I would like to take my DOS games on the go. Hey I have a video suggestion for you, maybe you could also do a video about late 90s to early 2000's gaming PCs. That video would be freaking cool!
When this video came out, I just knew that the ideal DOS gaming laptop would be something from the mid-1990s. My guess was spot on. May 3, 2019 3:17 am
+The 8-Bit Guy I have 3 large remote controlled daleks but sadly no k-9. I really want a K-9 now and only one dalek still works. I have a functioning sonic screwdriver though: ) Love all these vintage Computers and games even though I never used one. I wonder how they did video effects in 60s 70s and early 80s?
What about running games inside a virtual machine? For newer games that is not dependent on CPU clock speed your favorite virtualisation software, VMware, Virtualbox, and even the Hyper-V built into 64-bit Windows 10 will work. For older ones that depend on the CPU clock you can use Bochs. Almost all virtual machine software I know can play two-player game that used to require a serial cable, by tunnelling the serial traffic generated in the virtual machine through something else on the host machine, usually TCP/IP. So you can just put the game virtual machine files onto a file server, boot up two modern computers, grab that virtual machine image, set the serial port to a TCP/IP tunnel and game with your friend that way, probably over Ethernet (or if you have set up port forwarding on your router, over the Internet)
you can build a machine that has the look of those old computers and modern hardware inside them. Then let the machine boot directly into an emulator of those old computers. You have the look and feel of the old, you have the convenience of the modern hardware.
Quách Linh Đan An even better solution: use virtualization, you can run multiple virtual machines with variou old operating systems on it and connect to it using something like VNC as needed. This will allow you to have access to your old game library with any device that is capable of VNC: old computers, new computers (old or new chassis,) mobile phones, even Raspberry Pi's.
I just happen to have a Pentium 75 Compaq Laptop w/ TFT......... with WIN98 also installed on it. It comes with a CD-Rom & Floppy... & it boots fine. I still have about 100 MS-DOS programs (many from Packard Smell & V-tech Laser as part of their bundling). You are inspiring me to start looking at my extensive old computer collection (Timex Sinclair 1000, Commodore Vic 20, 64, 128, Apple 2 GS, Apple Macintosh Color Classic w/ scsi CD-rom, Portable Macintosh (the 1st one), Commodore Amiga (used to be used at a Cable Company), Toshiba Infinia 75, and a whole slew of parts and other computers as well. Original MS-DOS software including databases, spreadsheets, and word processors. Man, you really have got an excellent channel to go over these gems.
This brought back so many memories! My first computer had an 8088 processor. I was such a rebel teenager when I played "Leisure Suit Larry I: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards!". 😁
I have been running into roadblocks with it, i only have a 80gb 2.5 IDE drive and the laptop just hangs on the bios when i have it hooked up. I got a CF to ide adapter for it and a Transcend 4gb CF card. gonna get Win95 on it once USPS shows up with them. just curently using my main DOS/Win95 Pentium 133 430VX rig or using DOSBox on my Toshiba laptop until they arrive.
You actually can use USB floppy drives with old-school 8-bit computers, IF you download the right software to your Windows PC. I'm able to create perfectly usable MSX floppies, for example, using a USB floppy drive (that supports 720 KB dual-density 3.5" floppies, which is the real concern) simply by downloading and installing a program called "Disk Manager." It requires reading or writing an entire disk at once, so you can't just copy over one file at a time or anything, but you can drag and drop whatever you need into or out of the Disk Manager window, and it works perfectly. I believe similar programs exist for the file systems found on basically every other 8-bit computer -- the biggest concern is simply ensuring that your particular USB drive supports the physical disk format that your 8-bit computer of choice takes, since many won't recognize anything other than 1.44 MB high-density diskettes.
You sure Amiga-formatted floppies can be read and written to on a generic floppy drive connected to a PC these days? I remember trying to do this stuff on a PC in the late 90's and back then you apparently needed some special hardware to achieve that.
Amiga, I don't know, as I've never tried it -- I've never owned an Amiga. I only commented because 8-Bit Guy stated that disks formatted for 8-bit computers in general can't be read from or written to using a standard USB floppy drive, but I know for certain that they can be for MSX, at the very least (since I do it all the time). I'm also fairly certain they can be for PC-88 and PC-98 as well. Beyond the Japanese 8-bit microcomputers, though, I couldn't say -- I just sort of assumed that if it works for some 8-bit floppies, there's probably a way to make it work for most others as well.
I think I am just going to see what I can do with the Dell Dimension CPx my nephew gave me years ago. At one time, I think I had some sort of Linux on it, then a very painfully slow XP. Now I have a very basic DOS 7.10 off the Windows 98SE install CD on it with a someone broken 98SE build that I can get to with win. I think I will eventually see if I can get the 98 build usable, then get DOS level sound and networking going, and toss in WfW 3.11 as well as a lightweight Linux. Ultimately though, this will be my DOS gaming laptop.
Thanks for this info, I just realised that I can run the bubble bobble game with the DOSBox on my MacBook 12 inch, brings back so much memories.........it just made my day ^^
Super random question, what is the version of Columns you were playing around 2:29? I have been looking for it for years and I cannot remember the name of it and thus can never find it x'D I always liked the effects it had when you had a really long game going.
