Ok so it is this one?

http://www.cnet.com/products/toshiba-satellite-a45-s121-celeron-2-8-ghz-256-mb-ram-40-gb-hdd/specs/

with his graphics chipset:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Extreme-Graphics-2.2179.0.html

How much memory do you have on it by the way?

Quite low specs I guess, so I am unsure how fit it is to run DOSBox games. If you are not happy to its performance with DOSBox, nor you can get MS-DOS or FreeDOS to run on it nicely, then I don't know what to say. It doesn't seem that good for running old Windows (Direct3D) games either, due to the graphics chipset. Maybe 2D games are fine on it.

By the way have you tried the different renderer options in DOSBox config, in case one of them works better for you? On e.g. GOG games it seems to be quite often set to "surface" IIRC, but for me "ddraw" usually seems to work the best.

As for Linux Mint or LUbuntu, you can run Windows game (some at least) with WINE, but again the problem might be the low specs. I wasn't suggesting to use Linux on it to run games, but for other use (web browsing etc.).

If you consider that MS-Dos games pretty much went away when Win95/98 were around, some used graphics accelerators (Quake games) but other than that... a 300Mhz+ breaks Win95, and 600-800Mhz is going to be more than enough to run any DOS game as everything was windows about that time. The last game i can think of that had DOS versions/ports for a wider audience would be like Apache/hind Longbow, maybe MechWarrior 2... And those didn't really have huge graphical requirements as i always remember running them in software mode.

1GB

It's kind of in the sweet spot between not being able to play many Windows games and not being powerful enough for emulating PS1 games or anything. It would really be a shame if it couldn't run DOSBox. That would really suck. I've had this thing for eight years and I can't bring myself to put it up. I don't need it for browsing because I do that on my phone mainly.

Yeah, but emulating them through DOSBox might still make that aging laptop struggle... not sure though, only the OP can tell for sure. I don't recall which is the oldest PC where I've run DOSBox, and how well it worked there.

I'm not sure about the Win95 breaking at 300 MHz+ CPU speeds, but at least Win98SE runs fine on much faster PC (I'm running it on two with at around 1-2GHz speeds). The only thing is that you should limit the RAM to 512MB because more can apparently cause some vcache problems or shit. There are various ways to do that, either from within Windows 98SE itself if you can get that far, or by editing some ini files vcache values or something...

I have the instructions somewhere. In some cases the Win98SE installation itself will fail with too much RAM and you have to edit some ini file and then resume the installation; sometimes the installation seems to go fine but still you should limit the RAM in e.g. system properties afterwards, while in Windows.



That's just crazy, man. :) I still get irritated with browsing on either a phone or tablet, unless it is a web page designed specifically for mobile devices (more and more are, but sometimes the mobile version is a severely cut version of the desktop web page version...).

Are you e.g. writing your messages in the GOG forum with the phone? Ok that would explain why you don't edit the quotes then, but leave them as they are... :) But still quite an achievement, I have sometimes tried the same but it has felt quite nasty.

It was a thing, timing was getting too short for the original code so a patch was issued to make it work past the 300Mhz speed....

Ahh here we are

It's amazing how many sites are mobile friendly now. They have to be or search engines don't put them on the first page (most of the time).

I'm actually writing my replies on the laptop, mostly. It wasn't on this forum, but someone accused me of editing their message to change the meaning of their post. Obviously it was on a religious forum. Anyway, I don't edit anything now because of that. I just leave it as it is.

You were lucky, my parents' 386 only had 40 MB of disk space.64 MB ought to be enough for anybody.

I couldn't read all the posts (too much info), however, I can see that you are having problems running games in DosBOX and are looking to have a PC installed with FreeDOS or MS-DOS. Also, you said that the earliest Microsoft OS you have used is Windows XP.

My advice: Instead of going for full MS-DOS, why don't you try Windows 95 or Windows 98?
They are based in MS-DOS so drivers shouldn't be a problem. you can also boot to a command line (which is actually the MS-DOS) but you would need to know how to load the drivers in the files CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT.

The truth is that no matter the choice you make, you will require to read a lot to make the games work.

My approach is, whenever I make an edit, I leave a note indicating what I changed, even if the change is trivial.

Edit: Added note about trivial changes.

I would be okay with that. I don't have a copy of Windows 95 or 98 though. Is there a legal and cheap way to get them?

I think I fried my laptop. When I was installing Mint I left it to finish up and when I came back it was really hot and now it's making awful sounds. I can't tell if it's the fan or not but I can't take the thing apart because there is one screw I can't take out. Any advice?


That's smart. Perhaps I should be editing so there's less clutter on my posts.

I just searched in amazon and they are still selling Windows 98 SE, which I would recommend. Regarding that one screw, sorry, I can't advice on anything but if the system is making awful sounds, it is usually a fan or the hard drive (not many movable parts in a laptop).

I did finally get it to budge and I cleaned out the fan but it's still making some bad noise and overheating. Someone I work with had an old laptop (but so much newer than mine) that he wasn't using so he gave it to me. I just have to buy a hard drive. It also doesn't have an OS. I could use Linux because I almost always have my computers set to dual boot with Linux but I'd love to have windows on it. I should be able to play the majority of my games on it. I rarely play any new stuff anyway. New games are so damn expensive and they are generally crap anyway.

I'll check out Windows 98 and see what I can do. If I can find a really cheap fan for my laptop I'll buy it and go the Windows 98 route and see how that goes.