Need some help valuating an old laptop

[Unknown_K]

I mean, I gamed on win98 laptops. In fact I was weirdly obsessed with being able to play games on a laptop back then.

Congrats you were one of the 1% who did.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Laptop gaming didn't happen until XP or later, so I don't see that many people spending cash to have a shitty Win98 experience on commodity laptops.

Congrats you were one of the 1% who did.

... no? I mean, yeah, sure, obviously nobody living in the late 90's that was serious about gaming would have bought a laptop *instead* of a desktop gaming rig, but people certainly *played* games on laptops before Windows XP came out. (Remember, XP didn't actually hit general availability until October 2001; Windows 2000 was "out" since late 1999 but it was pretty rare in the wild, even most corporate laptops came with 98 until XP came out.) At the place I was working in 2000 the standard issue laptop was Dell Inspiron 3800s (they were saving a few bucks over buying the Latitude equivalent) and although most of the engineers were running a Linux or BSD on them during work hours everyone kept a Windows 98 dual boot installed so they could play Half-Life/Team Fortress/Unreal Tournament/whatever after hours. Obviously not everyone used their laptops, some guys stuffed Voodoo or early Nvidia cards in their desktops, but a skilled player on their doggy Pentium III laptop with a Rage Mobility M1(*) with graphics detail turned down to "animatic" could still be a formidable opponent.

(* The Rage Mobility M1 was on the higher end of laptop graphics chipsets in late 1999 but far from top of the line; it was basically a Mach64 with some mild steroid injections and charitably would benchmark somewhere between a Riva128 and RivaTNT desktop card. About the best you could get was the Mobility 128s, which were in the RivaTNT2 ballpark. Sorta.)

Maybe "nobody" 3D gamed on the gutless Windows 95 laptops with low-end Pentiums and C&T VGA chipsets without a single ounce of 3D acceleration (IE, something like the Toshiba Satellite Pro 400 series) that were typical up until the end of 1998 or so, but there was a whole generation (around 4 years worth) of laptops that were at least *minimally* capable of running 3D games (even if it was with chipsets that were mostly a joke, like the S3 3D ViRGE) produced during the era for which Windows 9x was the most common OS for laptops, and for casual 3D gaming on the go they were better than nothing. Per @Plasma's comment, let's be clear-eyed, *everyone* played Solitaire/minesweeper/etc on their laptops, *ZERO* exceptions, and there were a ton of other casual games that didn't rely on 3D acceleration. If we include those under the umbrella of "gaming" then it's really ridiculous to say that only "1%" of laptop owners "gamed" in the Windows 9x era.

Anyway. To be clear here, I'm not actually making the case that buying a laptop specifically to run Windows 9x on makes any sense. There are ways to run almost all the games from this era sandboxed on modern Windows, or even alternative operating systems, so I personally don't see the point of investing in flaky old hardware to do it unless the goal is very specifically to experience some weird piece of hardware like an oddball 3D accelerator for which an emulator (like, say, the GLIDE emulators for Voodoo-specific games) just won't do. (And clearly a laptop won't qualify for that job anyway.) But I guess the flip side here is this: if I'm interpreting the benchmarks that are out there correctly a laptop like a Dell D600/Inspiron 600m, if you get everything working, will actually run Windows 9x games with about the same level of performance as a pretty well fitted out 2001-ish gaming desktop. (The Mobility 9000 looks like it has roughly comparable pixel-shoving power as a GeForce 2-ish level desktop graphics card, a Pentium M at 1.5Ghz is up there with a Thunderbird Athlon or the very best Windows 9x-era Pentium 4s.) If you're crazy enough to actually have nostalgia for Windows 9x, want to run it bare metal, and don't have room in your life for a period desktop(*), maybe a machine like this could scratch a legitimate itch.

(* It's not just people in Japan that have to put limits on how many big metal boxes they bring into their houses.)

More broadly I guess someone would have to ask *why* they want to run these games on vintage hardware in the first place. I'll be blunt, I have to admit to me at least it kind of seems like missing the point to build a "nostalgia machine" if it's using parts that don't actually fit the period you're trying to recreate and performs at a level you never could have achieved (or afforded). I have some pretty specific memories of how games ran on late-1999-early-2000 vintage hardware, and honestly I think the jank of an underpowered video card was part of the fun. I'm going to guess if I were to install some of those games on my D600 they'll perform disappointingly too well to really be nostalgic.

(I remember installing "Star Wars Episode I Racer" on one of the Insprion 3800s I mentioned above, and there were some aspects that were kind of hilarious. The game performed "okay" and never really chugged frame-rate-wise on the Rage Mobility, but fog effects were broken. It just so happened that one of the tracks is set in a kind of "cloud city" environment with no ground, the trackway is suspended in midair, and without said fog effects you got a clear view of how short the draw distance was in the game; it was pretty trippy to see the game frantically building the track right in front of you for the whole race.)

 

[Zare]

After work, I'd come to our spot in the city a bit earlier than rest of the bunch, and I would sit down sip coffee and play something on company issued laptop. Mostly 2D point and click stuff, Flash games. This was in the XP age. Don't see why this would be any different a few years before.

The laptop was actually capable to play games, a P4 with nVidia card, I ran FreeBSD on it.

Do you all remember mobile PDA and cellphone gaming before Android, iOS with OpenGL? Symbian and Windows mobile stuff, they had great games one can dump half a hour into easily, but it was in no shape or form an alternative to Gameboy Advance. I see laptop gaming before gaming laptops this kind of an affair - you have the device for work purposes, but it can also run a few games worth running, so why not spin them up occasionally.

I had a NEC Travelmate PDA that had 32MB storage in total, so I could put about one album of 128kbit MP3 on it. Hardly an optimal portable player for early 00s, but it was there and it served the purpose.

 

[Istarian]

Clean working 600ms will sell for around $100 on eBay.

I think it's more that they can than they do, but perhaps the market has shifted a little.

The big price difference is really in the department of whether it's complete and ready to use (to the extent possible for a vintage laptop) or if it will need any work or parts on arrival.

Installing an OS and software isn't too bad, but needing a hard drive/ssd and not having maxed out memory matter a lot for especially old systems.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Installing an OS and software isn't too bad, but needing a hard drive/ssd and not having maxed out memory matter a lot for especially old systems.

“Needing a hard drive” is a huge red flag for eBay-ing any laptop, but especially ones of this era, because if the original drive is *missing*, verses just dead, there’s a very good chance the proprietary cable/drawer/slides you need to install one are missing or damaged too.

PATA to m2/MSATA adapters are readily available so if the drawers/cables are there it shouldn’t be a big deal to get a working disk, but I suppose that comes with the proviso that right now the prices of SSDs are nowhere near as cheap as they were. (I converted a couple old G4 PowerBooks to SSD a few years ago and the 128 GB drives only cost about the same as the adapters. Looks like it’s more like 3x now.)

 

[Istarian]

Sometimes you get lucky on the hard drive tray/caddy, but yeah missing that part
is a very common problem. Tracking down a replacement one can be tricky at this point.

I carefully inspect all provided photos on ebay listings for details like that.

You could probably create a 3D printed replacement for some of the simpler designs, though, if you had a decent picture and some calipers to take necessary measurements.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Yeah I think sometimes people forget that "gaming" in the 90s wasn't just playing AAA titles with high-end GPUs.

Yeah I never had a high-end GPU back in the day. My desktop was a 433mhz celeron, my laptop was a 233mhz pentium II. I recall many an evening sitting in my chair with my legs propped up, playing on the laptop while the deskltop ran beside me. I just had a weird obsession with the concept of "I can pick this machine up, take it anywhere, and play my games on it". I was a weird kid.

I really miss that laptop. I want to say it was an NEC? I kinda wish I could find one now.

 

[3lectr1c]

I think you can sum it up by saying "people didn't buy a laptop in the 90s for gaming, but people definitely gamed on laptops". My ThinkPad 701C came to me with the original install intact, untouched since the late 90s. It had three categories of data on it: the database work program (likely the reason the laptop was purchased), several games, and a whole lot of pixelated pornography. ....yeah. Laptops were way too expensive for a "gamer" to buy one, but if you had one for work already, there wasn't anything stopping you from having a little fun.

I really miss that laptop. I want to say it was an NEC? I kinda wish I could find one now.

NEC - MacDat

MacDat's information repository for laptops manufactured by NEC. Documentation, specifications, and more!

macdat.net

Here's my documentation which covers every NEC laptop through 2001, you can probably recognize the one you had somewhere in this list

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Laptops were way too expensive for a "gamer" to buy one, but if you had one for work already, there wasn't anything stopping you from having a little fun.

It was a little bit a bummer in this late Windows 9x period where you might have two laptops that are roughly equal in CPU power but one had a video chip that had at least somewhat workable 3D (like the Rage Mobility) but the other had basically nothing. For instance, I *really* liked the physical design of the Thinkpad 600 series, and the 600x had Pentium III processors in the same league as the much cheesier Inspiron I had, but I believe the NeoMagic video chip IBM used in those had basically no 3D support at all. (I think the one feature it did have was hardware acceleration for MPEG2 decoding, because coming into 1999 being able to play DVDs on your laptop was considered the next hawt feature. Full motion porn on the go, before the Internet was up for it!) IBM switched to an S3 Savage with the T20, which was kind of a garbage fire in a lot of ways, but at least theoretically could do 3D at about the same level as an ATI Rage.

... but yeah, the fact that laptop makers were largely moving from 3D-less chips to ones that had at least token capability for it at least two years before XP came out shows there was at least some demand for 3D on top of point-and-click gaming on the go.

 

[Unknown_K]

I think the upgraded GPUs were for DVD playback more than gaming. Early 3D chips created heat, and laptops were not known for tolerating that heat back then.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I think the upgraded GPUs were for DVD playback more than gaming. Early 3D chips created heat, and laptops were not known for tolerating that heat back then.

They are two different feature sets; you can have a video chip that accelerates MPEG2 and not 3D, and vice-versa(*). The point here is that by late 1999 it was becoming more common than not for better laptops to have chips with real 3D capability, specifically, and again, that's two years before Windows XP. FWIW, ATI (calling them out because I'm most familiar with their stuff) was doing 3D in laptop chipsets all the way back to at least the Rage LT series, which is 1997 vintage. These chips weren't exactly Voodoo competitors but compared to other single-chip graphics with 3D capabilities of the time they were decent. So strictly speaking you could buy a 3D capable laptop with Windows 95 on it, you didn't even need to wait for Windows 98.

*Edit: Specific example: The early versions of the ThinkPad 770, circa late 1997, came with a Trident CYBER9397 chip that *was*, in theory at least, 3D accelerated. (I say "in theory" because, yes, the capabilities of this generation of chips were mostly a joke compared to anything "gamers" remember fondly, IE, Voodoos, but we're grading on a curve here.) Later versions came with the CYBER9397DVD which, as the name suggests, incorporated video decoding acceleration that used to be on a separate daughterboard. I already mentioned the NeoMagic chip in the Thinkpad 600, which did *not* have any meaningful 3D support, but likewise did get MPEG acceleration in the later revisions over the life of the laptop. (The NeoMagic chips were well regarded for their 2D capabilities for business applications, which is why a 3D-less chip lasted so late in otherwise premium laptops.)

 

[Unknown_K]

3D games started in DOS and then transitioned to Windows 95/98.

The Rage LT series sucked, its main claim to fame was being able to resize images to full screen in hardware and being able to run 2 displays and different resolutions (basically what a laptop needed at the time).

Google seems to think the real start of 3D gaming laptops was the Alienware Area 51M from 2002 (Pentium 4, ATI mobile 9600).

 

[3lectr1c]

the Alienware Area 51M from 2002 (Pentium 4, ATI mobile 9600).

Which would have been a rebadged Clevo 5600D or similar: https://macdat.net/laptops/clevo/5600d_5620d_5800d.php
Couldn't have the ATI 9600 because that chip didn't come out until 2004. Once again evidence that the google AI is not to be trusted.

The first gaming laptop that you can definitely call a gaming laptop was also made by Clevo (via their Kapok subsidiary), the 5200/5400 in 1995: https://macdat.net/laptops/kapok/5000.php
Take one look at the palmrest and you'd have a hard time claiming it wasn't a "gaming laptop". It wasn't 3D accelerated yet of course, that didn't happen until the S3 ViRGE/MX launched in early '98.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Google seems to think the real start of 3D gaming laptops was the Alienware Area 51M from 2002 (Pentium 4, ATI mobile 9600).

Funny how the Internet seems to think that outsourcing your brain to a Google AI query is the ultimate Uno Reverse these days.

The Rage LT series sucked, its main claim to fame was being able to resize images to full screen in hardware and being able to run 2 displays and different resolutions (basically what a laptop needed at the time).

The discussion is not whether these chips "sucked" (they all sucked, EVERY SINGLE 3D CHIP FROM THE 1990's "sucked" by any objective measure), it's whether they were 3D capable enough to give some bored schlub a few minutes of amusement playing a game with *slightly* better performance than they'd get from pure software rendering. And even though the drivers were a huge dumpster fire for *years* these chips could check that box; the Rage Pro/LT generation of the 3D Mach 64's could almost match the original Voodoo that was only one year older at this point. (Which completely on its own makes the point that this tech was hugely immature at the time and moving at such a quick pace; a machine that actually had the best 3D capabilities you could buy in January 1998 is going to essentially be a serial terminal compared to something you fished out of a cereal box in 2001. You have to judge these things by how they compared in the moment.)

The blunt fact is that laptops were not actually that far behind desktops when it comes to 3D being a "mainstream" feature, IE, that you'd probably get at least some level of support built into your average video card even if you didn't go specifically out of your way to buy it. I'm sensing a severe case of "moving the goalposts" here; we've gone from "less than 1% of people even played games on their laptops before Windows XP" to "Nobody specifically built a full-out BALLS TO THE WALL "gaming laptop" until (GoogleGoogle)... Alienware! Yeah, Alienware! See, I win!".

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Take one look at the palmrest and you'd have a hard time claiming it wasn't a "gaming laptop".

I’d kind of forgotten just how popular CD-ROM based multimedia games that didn’t need 3D were in the 90’s. (I mean, I guess I should have recalled that given how the ProAudio Spectrum sound card/CD-ROM bundle I bought for the 486 around 1992 or so came with like 20 of them.) From that perspective I’d probably argue any laptop with a CD-ROM drive and a sound card (two things that weren’t really getting close to universal until, I dunno, late 1996?) could be called a “gaming laptop”.

 

[3lectr1c]

I define "gaming laptop" as a laptop expressly designed and/or marketed for video games above other uses. So by that logic I don't think anything really qualifies between that Kapok 5200/5400 in 1995 and the Alienware in 2002 (which was one of the very first laptops explicitly marketed for video games). That being said, as we've said in this thread, many laptops that aren't explicitly defined/marketed as "gaming laptops" are effectively gaming laptops in everything but intent. Clevo/Kapok was making balls to the walls desktop replacements for years before companies like Alienware started putting a shiny coat of bright colored paint on them and selling them to gamers

 

[Eudimorphodon]

That being said, as we've said in this thread, many laptops that aren't explicitly defined/marketed as "gaming laptops" are effectively gaming laptops in everything but intent.

I think someone mentioned this already, but one has to factor into this equation the fact that "Desktop replacement" laptops in the mid-late 90's sold for $2,500 and up, or around $5,000 today. (That Thinkpad 770 I mentioned? List price was almost $7,000. Not today, in 1997 money.) Calling them "Desktop replacements" is way smarter strategy for getting your employer to buy it for you than admitting that the reason you want that one is you would *really* love to play the CD-ROM version of Wing Commander in your hotel room between sales meetings.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

... Anyway. FWIW, the first "gaming laptop" I owned was a Toshiba T-1100 Plus, "the ideal computer for the mobile professional", bought at a garage sale around a decade before Windows XP came out. (Give or take a few years.) Pretty sexy machine, had an ultra-widescreen display, a mechanical (gaming!) keyboard... could play a real mean game of Round42 or Digger on that thing, although I guess I'll admit that when things started moving too quickly for the LCD you kind of had to use the Force to kill the enemies you otherwise couldn't see.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

NEC - MacDat

MacDat's information repository for laptops manufactured by NEC. Documentation, specifications, and more!

macdat.net

Here's my documentation which covers every NEC laptop through 2001, you can probably recognize the one you had somewhere in this list

Based on specs if it WAS an NEC at all(memory is foggy after 26 years) it would have been from the late 90s Versa line. Unfortunately that site doesn't have a lot of pictures with the laptops closed, and the most memorable dettail with the distinctive shape of the lid.

 

[luRaichu]

I have the 500m. Hard drive was in poor health and clocked over 14,000 hours.
Don't think I could get much use out of it, other than sending faxes with the built-in modem.
Cheapest one of these on eBay right now costs $60