Your thoughts on using T42 with ATI 9600 for 98SE gaming rig?

[thinkpadcollection]

Topic says all.

I have been aware of many comments about 98SE on 'net but still can deal with it for drivers and old games.
Will that work out well with the ATI 9600 64MB chipset and limit the memory sticks to 1GB total?

While ago I collected games and they did not work well on DOS and looks like needs 98SE. I do not have a GPU on T420 and my main desktop is too old to emulate demanding DOS and 98SE games. (E8600, 16GB, HD3650) DOSbox and virtualbox how does they emulate high end graphics if high end old games requires this?

One more question will integrated GPU or weak GPU suffice?

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[RealBlackStuff]

FYI: T42 can take 2x1GB RAM.

[kfzhu1229]

You are wasting T42's power. It is a bad idea because Windows 98 does poor if at all for the DX9 support which is 9600's hardware level. The GPU is too new that the driver may not work properly. Throw something like A3x into 98 gaming will be a good idea. Even for 1gb of RAM 98 will be unstable. Forget about 2gb RAM in 98...

[thinkpadcollection]

Update files kit for 98SE includes directx 9.0C support which ATI mobility 9600 is capable of.

Yes, I am aware of T42's 2GB memory support but 98SE will not able to do so, hence question about doing 1GB using pair of 512MB sticks and append few lines in the config.sys to get DOS to work right as well.

I'm not interested doing T23 (GPU is weak and ill supported while A31p GPU is okay but pushing around so much resolution is a moot point. Performance-wise that CPU (2.0GHz P4-M) is as fast as T23's PIII 1.2GHz yet P4 has more features despite that, Pentium-m 2.0GHz 2MB performance doubled and does have features P4 is.

Hence the pick is T42 which already have in hand.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[kfzhu1229]

You know you can put a UXGA LCD into SVGA resolution which one square pixel equals to four SVGA square pixels. The DX90C support in W98 is VERY poor. I tried to put A30 in Windows 98 with ATI and Sound card drivers from Lenovo China (Only Chinese version of think support will provide ALL the drivers included in the drivers tab of this forum) and the 3DMark01 results were TWICE lower than the results in Windows 7. You can also see that from video playback as well. If you have 7500 or 9000 you can try Windows 98 but 9600 will be converted into 9000 if you do so. Also I ran into the ACPI shutdown issues in Windows 98 that it tells you it is safe to shut down your computer instead of turning itself off and if you uncheck the disable fast shutdown option in msconfig it restarts instead of shutting it down, while I did not see that problem in WME for some reason. You know you are better off putting a G series TP into this if you really do not like the A series

[Dekks]

if your focusing on win98se due to win16bit being needed, if it can run xp do it as that has win16bit too. That's my experience with a X30 for old games.

[kfzhu1229]

if your focusing on win98se due to win16bit being needed, if it can run xp do it as that has win16bit too. That's my experience with a X30 for old games.

If you say in that way even edit.com works in Windows 10 x86!!

[dr_st]

While ago I collected games and they did not work well on DOS and looks like needs 98SE. I do not have a GPU on T420 and my main desktop is too old to emulate demanding DOS and 98SE games. (E8600, 16GB, HD3650) DOSbox and virtualbox how does they emulate high end graphics if high end old games requires this?

A lot of different and partially contradicting topics are mixed here.

1. There is no such thing as "games that do not work well on DOS". They either work or don't. If a game needs Windows, then it will not run at all on DOS. The opposite is possible - i.e. some DOS games run just fine on any version of Windows (32-bit at least), some run fine on Win9x but not on NT-anything, and some only like pure DOS. If you mean that the games did not work well in the built-in command-prompt of XP, then it's the latter case. Depending on the game, you may be fine with Win98SE, or with DOSBox, or pure DOS (which is available with 98SE).
2. DOSBox does not emulate Windows and does not support Win9x games. While it is possible to get it to sort-of work in unofficial DOSBox versions, it is by no means supported, and rarely works well.
3. Your desktop is not too old to emulate even the most demanding DOS games that DOSBox supports. I've been using a very similar desktop for years and it works great. Granted, mine is a quad-core, but DOSBox is single-threaded anyways. For that matter, your T420 will work just as well if not better for the purpose of DOSBox.
4. There is no such thing "I don't have a GPU''. If you had no GPU, you would see nothing on your screen at any time. What you mean is that you don't have a discrete GPU. Still, the integrated GPUs have come quite a long way, and whatever you have in your T420 will probably be more than enough to run most, if not all, games that you would want to use Win98SE for. Actually, it will probably be significantly better than the Radeon 9600.

Overall, a T42 running Win98SE is not out of question. There can be legitimate use cases for such things. Folks on Vogons sometimes use even more powerful computers for Win98SE rigs. Go figure. There are a few things to consider:

1. As was mentioned, for 99% of the games you would want to run Win98SE for, it is way too powerful, and will be under-utilized.
2. With Win98SE you can get pure DOS more, but the sound device in the T42 does not support DOS, so you will not be able to have sound/music (except PC speaker of course).

Do you have any specific games in mind? It may be easier giving better advice if it's focused on a specific goal.

[danikayser84]

The main reason I initially went with the T23 for my Windows 98SE gaming laptop was because it was contemporary to Windows 98/2000 and it was portable enough for me; despite it having an S3 chipset and no Sound Blaster emulation, it's been doing well enough for me

I believe the last ThinkPad to offer SBPro/16 emulation was the T22 era, so if you're trying to go after DOS gaming, I'd recommend something like a 600X, 380Z or early T2x

[thinkpadcollection]

Also the reason for using 98SE for older windows gaming as well. I have number of games that would not run in DOS, 2000, or XP. Is there a most best thinkpad computer that do 98SE & 9.0C GPU well?

Otherwise other solutions not to use windows 98SE and emulate the windows games. Also emulate the 9.0C graphics as well, suggestions? Even fully upgraded i7-2640m T420 with integrated GPU will do?

Cheers, thinkpadcollection