My new MS DOS nostalgia rig!
Hello everyone.
I've just ordered a Compaq Armada 1700 laptop from eBay. It was only £25 and is fully working (even the battery works.) I've been looking for a all in one type solution for some classic gaming (no room for a proper rig) so I snapped it up quick!
It's spec:
Pentium II 266mhz
96mb RAM
6gb HDD
2MB graphics card
14 inch TFT (1024x768)
Floppy/CD ROM drives
Windows ME (changing to 95/98 when it arrives!)
My question is, is there any way to make older DOS games play nicely with it's sound card? As I'm pretty sure it's not a Sound Blaster so i can see many games having issues with it. Also, will the Pentium II be too fast? I used to try playing Bullfrogs Magic Carpet on modern'ish hardware and it ran soooo fast! Is 266Mhz too fast? If so, is there a way to limit the CPU in Windows/DOS?
Looking forward to enjoying my childhood again!
I've just ordered a Compaq Armada 1700 laptop from eBay. It was only £25 and is fully working (even the battery works.) I've been looking for a all in one type solution for some classic gaming (no room for a proper rig) so I snapped it up quick!
It's spec:
Pentium II 266mhz
96mb RAM
6gb HDD
2MB graphics card
14 inch TFT (1024x768)
Floppy/CD ROM drives
Windows ME (changing to 95/98 when it arrives!)
My question is, is there any way to make older DOS games play nicely with it's sound card? As I'm pretty sure it's not a Sound Blaster so i can see many games having issues with it. Also, will the Pentium II be too fast? I used to try playing Bullfrogs Magic Carpet on modern'ish hardware and it ran soooo fast! Is 266Mhz too fast? If so, is there a way to limit the CPU in Windows/DOS?
Looking forward to enjoying my childhood again!
Comments
A quick google search should help you find out if the card can operate in some sort of compatibility mode.
But nice find anyways. Please post some pictures of DOS games on this thing, especially DOOM
Looks promising! Yeah i will certainly post some pics when it arrives.
I have a Compaq Deskpro EN with a 400Mhz Pentium II and it seems to run all the games I've thrown at it just fine,
Are these good for MS DOS compatibility?
Since it says it is sound blaster compatible, it should be.
It is SB16-compatible, so most DOS games should run with no issue.
It has ESS Solo-1 audio. No issues.
Sound and Joystick work perfectly in Dos and W98.
Dos games run ok. Only speed issues is with real old games, like Castle Wolfenstein.
As long as you have the right drivers, you shouldn't have any problems. I haven't had any as of yet.
Feel very confident in this machine now I was worried i would encounter issues especially for the sound as it was a pretty quick impulse buy and i didn't even research it before i got it. I've been looking lately and these sort of laptops are in the £80/£100 range they have shot up massively! so for £20 I had to get it quick.
I've also ordered a IDE to CF card adaptor and a 2GB CF card (SLC industrial grade) so i will put windows 98/95 on the hard disk and MS DOS on the 2GB CF card. No real purpose to this apart from curiosity. I may upgrade to a 8GB CF card for windows after (BIOS has a 10GB hard drive limit.) As that way i can just take the card out and put it on my W10 machine and copy files over.
One issue i can see with the machine is it has one of those screens which displays 640x480 etc with black boarders. It doesn't fill the screen. That's a bit of a shame and I may look at switching out the panel. It came with these 2 panels as options:
From memory i think the type of panel i need is the CSTN model? Finding one now is likely going to be very hard so I'm curious if i could make another one fit?
A lot of these laptops had an option (or a special key combo) that would allow a lower resolution to fill the entire screen. On my Dell Latitude C610, it was the F7 key. Your key combo may be different though.
Unless you really want super pixel-perfect reproduction of the game, there is no need to switch to a lower-res screen. But if you want to, go with a 640x480 screen. Games will scale badly (or display a black border) on an 800x600 screen, and the key combo I talked about earlier will have little to no effect on these screens.
Sometimes there's an option to enable stretching - via key, firmware, or whatever.
One bad thing i found out though... is the BIOS is on a hard disk partition and not a ROM!! So i have to hope whoever put Windows ME on it didn't do a full wipe else i will need to locate the original restore disk(s) and restore the machine else i cannot choose which device to boot from!
Not good... :( Of course the boot order could already be in the right order although if the BIOS isn't present would there even be a boot order...? I've never dealt with an on disk BIOS before.
That's pretty weird. I wonder why any sane computer manufacturer would want to do that.
And also, not related to thread but it is your profile picture...Packard Bell computers were/are awful. They put used components into computers billed as new.
I can not express enough how dumb that was. Every time a hard drive got hosed or upgraded, I had to dig through Compaq's web site for the SPECIFIC diagnostics disks for that specific model.
On those models, if you needed to change something in the BIOS, and you didn't have a hard drive installed, and were missing the diagnostics floppy... you were fucked.
Someone deserves to be shot for that design choice.
This is one of the most retarded decisions ever made by a computer manufacturer.
I guess if their website ever goes down or they remove the files you could still grab a copy from the Wayback Machine, but there is no sense in having to do crap like that.
Oh god, I remember that... the reference disk era. Thankfully those days are over.
I agree, I had a PB Pulsar 19 (200mhz Pentium MMX) as my first brand new PC and it had endless issues and always performed SO slow even compared to equal machines. I also had a Packard Bell Executive (P1 75mhz) which was my sisters PC and my introduction to Windows 95.
As bad as they were/are... I have so many great memories of them as it was my intro to PC's outside of DOS. Hence the profile picture.
Not for me...
Would anyone happen to have a copy of the restore/diagnostic disk for this machine? Or know where i can find it?
Model info etc:
Edit:
Ok after a lot of research and a bit of luck... I found the file (i think) I searched the net and some posts from 2001 mentioned the file name "sp8975.exe" so i googled that and out of a load of sites i searched i managed to finally download it at: https://www.driversforhp.com/download-h ... iles-free/
I also noticed that the official HP site still has the Armada 1700 listed and there are BIOS options.
So that may be a later revision of what I'm after. Naturally, the exe file won't run on modern Windows so I need to get the machine here get the file on the machine and let it make the floppy disk in Windows ME.
As mentioned here previously by others... This is literally the most stupid idea I've ever come across from a PC manufacture.
Edit, edit..
Ok, after a little bit more digging on the official HP site I actually found my exact model.
Under that it also has my Computer Setup program i need! The file name also corrisponds to the file i found on google so I'm good to go now!
Props to HP for still having support for this machine. I'm actually very impressed.
The screen actually has black spots and also a green line on the right side of the TFT. Such a shame but hey there we go...
At least it works i suppose... Anyway, i also noticed every single bolt was loose as well as the hinges. They had a lot of play in them so it was onward and upward to repair the machine.
First things first, tackling that white mark on the lid with rubbing alcohol.
Next up, the hinges... upon inspection not only were the bolts loose but the plastic supports were cracked too!
I got the screen off and began tackling it.
I'm hoping super glue will hold it but to be honest when you move the screen it puts a lot of stress on those mounts so it might not be enough... time will tell.
Getting quite involved now...
While the glue dries i went ahead and gave the machine a really deep clean.
Much better!!
Next up, the screen! I wanted to get a model number as i will likely look for a replacement but i also thought it may be the ribbon cable on the back causing the green lines on the right side.
Sadly, it wasn't. It is likely the panel itself.
Although its not the best screen, i will still use it for now so i gave it a good clean up.
Once the glue was set, i put the screen back on and made sure it all booted fine.
All good! I also tested to see if i could get into the BIOS and i can't so... i will need to restore the partition as i expected...
Onwards and upwards!
I copied the file to the floppy drive via my main PC and tried to copy over to the laptop... in proper Windows ME/foppy disk style...
So, another spare floppy and tried again and this time it worked. I ran the MS-DOS program and away we go!
After that copied to the floppy drive I rebooted and...
Whooohoooooo!
Finally i can make changes to the BIOS and also get Windows 98 installed safely.
Making a Windows ME startup floppy so i can run Fdisk and also being the windows 98 SE install.
Partitioned and ready to roll! Windows install time!
All done, ready for first boot!
And... we made it!
Time to test out gaming on it!
Runs perfectly! I think I'm about done now, I will keep looking for a replacement TFT screen but overall very happy with it. perfect little retro gaming machine.
Gotta love eBay at times! Can't wait to fit it.
Much better! No more issues on the right side or pressure points on the screen. It's now good to go!
AC adapters should be the least of your worries since this machine has a built-in power supply which takes the 3-prong "Mickey Mouse" power cord; off-hand I think some models have a composite video out jack so if you have a crazy desire to play some DOS games on a TV set, you can try that too.