I both laughed and cringed at the two player demonstration. You're awesome!

12:44 that laugh cured my depression

Seeing the two player setup and you having fun with a friend genuinely made my day, thank you David

Wow, I loved how those old laptops had removable modular drives and peripherals.

This has to be one of the most interesting channels on youtube. Thanks for all the awesome videos!!!

Me: *Learned computers in MS-DOS era* 8-Bit Guy: MS-DOS are the ancestors of modern computers... Me: Damn I feel old.... :(

FYI: DOSBox does have the capability to use Nullmodems and even IPX.

"Aw man, not the volcano!" Lol

AWWW MAN NOT THE VOLCANO

Even though i will probably never buy one of these, i had to stick around for the whole video, because it is so well made and interesting.

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+

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).

i'm not even really that interested in playing old DOS games, but this was actually just a really good video. keep em coming dammit!

I'm not gonna build a vintage gaming PC, and yet I watched the whole video with utmost attention :/

I use this video for fun and studying English. Thank you 8 bit guy!

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

I always get excited when I see a new post from +The 8-Bit Guy. We love you 8-Bit Guy!

Love love LOVE old portables! It's an addiction!

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 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.👍👌🏻👏🏻👏🏻

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.

5:03 Tyrian! Love that game :-)

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 wait for MS-TRES to come out

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.

3 minutes in and already this is so informative

March 2016! This was the masterpiece that sent me through the retrocomputing rabbit hole. Eight eventful years! Thank you!

You're the best - this is EXACTLY what I was looking for; moving from classic PowerBooks to PCs of this era

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

12:23 That was awesome! I used to play DOOM a long time ago. Your channel is nostalgic! :)

This video is sensational. You are a master of your craft sir. some serious research and effort went into putting this together.

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.

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.

13:42 someone call druaga1....

That LAN party with a friend killed it :-D. Thanks so much for your great videos. Making quarantine easier...

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)!

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

You know they're enjoying it when you can see it without even hearing them laugh at each other.

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.

I love how your office and production areas have evolved!

Instructions unclear, ended up installing DosBox.

I actually recently found the Compaq 486 laptop and remembered this video.

I truly admire your passion and knowledge. It's a joy to watch, and yes, this is giving me great nostalgia. Thanks for posting!

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

Love your videos. Keep up this kind of content.

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.

Your commodore episodes predated me by just a little. This, now this is my era. This is pure nostalga for me.

What an outstanding piece of info we have here - surfed through a dozen of videos and no one even came close.

Oh man, so many memories of Monuments of Mars. That took me back!

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?

Love these videos. Right from the opening music jingle. Like when your favourite tv show would start as a kid. Keep them coming :-)

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!

You can buy some modern Dell machines that ship with an installation disk for FreeDOS, and open source remake of MS-DOS

Can someone tell me what is the name of game at 3:40 ?

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.

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.

Me trying to buy even one of those recommended laptops on ebay: $199 O.O

14:40 That's what I was thinking, I've learned a lot with your videos. Greetings

I follow your videos for a while now, you are a great guy and your videos are awesome!

The 2 player thing with your friend there brought back fond memories :)

I'm looking around on eBay and most DOS/Win9x laptops seem to be either above $100 or under $100 and broken in some way. Ehhhhhhhh.

You really deserve more subscribers.

Never thought I'd see Ultimate Domain run ever again XD thanks for taking me back

I was inspired by this video to buy an IBM ThinkPad 600. Now I can play The Magic School Bus Explores the Human Body, which I hadn't played for about 20 years! Thanks 8-Bit Guy!

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.

12:34 Friend blown up into chunks conveniently sized for large freezer bags.

This gotta be the best 8 bit guy video. ITs so funny, has a story. he is kinda selling the idea of getting an old laptop, not just reviewing

I was looking for this video, but could not find it by searching, Thanks The 8-Bit Guy, for making such beautiful retro ....

Ah yea!!! DOS Games, i used to LOVE going through CD-ROM and floppy DOS games at Walmart cause they always had these big "grab-bag" style setups

Man this really brought me back to my gaming origins lol, thank you for that. It's easy to forget atong doom on keyboard only when I'm slaying these poor console kids with my high end mouse and keyboard, and thousands of hours of practice. And it's really heart warming that the younger generation can see how hard multiplayer gaming was for us, lugging whole pc setups to a friend's house to run a Lan party. Playing quake online on dial up. Thanks man

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 find your content uniquely calming. Looking forward to more.

Hey bud you are from Fort Worth too!? Awesome to see that! I had no idea you were a fellow Texan. I guess most of us lost our Texan Twang living in such a large city. XD

Nice informative video, thanks for uploading. :)

Finally was able to find a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CDT! DOS gaming has never been better! Thank you for your video!

Playing Duke Nukem with your friend brought back memories of my friends and I playing video games in the late 80s

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

Should try resending the card but use a stamp this time.

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...

Watched this video about 5 and half year ago and started to hunt down the best possible MS-DOS laptops. - Fist I find one : IBM ThinkPad 310E 2600 which almost perfect with Yamaha YMF715 except the fact it comes with SVGA TFT panel. It doesn't upscale very well. - Second Find: Satellite PRO 4200 which was amazing for most of the DOS games but still suffered from upscaling issues. - Third Find: Then I drifted all the way to Pentium 3 laptops and I find the "Holy Grail of All Retro Laptops" (said by the retro community) at one of the e-cycle.: Toshiba Satellite PRO S2800-600. This is the best for most of DOS games and early 3D games. Equipped with Yamaha YMF754 + Geforce2 Go which upscale every DOS games perfectly to XGA resolution. However still a hit miss for DOS gaming because in some cases still too fast. - Forth find: Miracle just happened last week when I randomly logged in one of the biggest used Hungarian PC marketplace and someone was just listed 3 hours before a MINT condition 400 CDT. I guess now my mission is complete :D

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!

16:07 DOS box does have an option for Serial Multiplayer, but to my knowing it's a complete pain in the ass to set up.

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!". 😁

That compaq laptop was my very first laptop! It was a 486DX - Can never forget the trackball mouse mounted on the monitor part.. loved it back then

"the other day I was reading this old Compute's Gazette magazine from 1983" *January 1984 intensifies*

3:38 It makes me feel great,smarter,more aggressive.

I really enjoy your content David! Thank you for this stuff, I find everything you post just fascinating !

In this day and age where retro laptops are sold for double in what they are worth, the best advice I can give a buyer is to not focus on brand name, but on operating system compatibility. This way you're focusing on the big picture: obtaining a laptop (no matter the brand or model) that runs an original operating system (no virtual riff raff). Obsessing over a particular model of laptop can become a weary and expensive search process.

2:59 the music sounds like "Piece of Time", pure speed metal from the italian band "Labyrinth". Just look for it on KZfaq. Now, the question is WHY?!

Got one of the Toshiba 400 from a lady neighbor that needed some work done on her modern computer, when she asked how much was it I just said "are you using that old laptop for anything" Had to repair the hard drive with extreme caution, the platter was stuck to the head (probably overheated) it works perfectly 😊

Two player demonstration with null cable was hilarious!

I love all the Futurama references in your videos.

also with duke nukem multiplayer the one who has the server has 0 ping and one who "dials" has 300ms ping - even with null modem cable

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.

This is so awesomely nerdy in a genuine way.

I'm using an IBM Thinkpad 380XD, it is PERFECT! I have every single feature i need built in, cd and floppy are live together harmonically, no need to swap drives, CF card compatibility is very good, USB, excellent sound card and high quality speakers! I think it tops the LTE 5000 series... With all the love I have for the Compaq brand...

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)

12:58 about ten years ago my brother said that when we go to the old folks home they'll have LAN night instead of bingo night... Doesn't seem so funny anymore ._.

David is great at explaining complicated things.

It is possible to play MS-DOS IPX network games using DOSBox between 2 or more modern PCs. Just set the IPX value to "true" in the DOSBox config files (on each machine), and then run the "ipxnet connect" command (followed by the server machine's IP address) for each client machine, and then run the "ipxnet startserver" command on the "server" machine. To play an MS-DOS IPX network game between modern PCs running DOSBox and real MS-DOS PCs, the DOSBox SVN "Daum" build is the key. This DOSBox build emulates the Novell-based NE2000 network adapter. While setting up the NE2000 driver requires a few relatively straightforward steps, once properly set up, it works great. Just make sure that, for your modern PCs, you set each machine's emulated NE2000 MAC address to different values, or those players can't join your game. One limitation is that this seems to work only for wired Ethernet connections (at least with Windows 10). I got this to work successfully between two modern PCs running Windows 10, an IBM Aptiva (Windows 95), and 2 Toshiba Librettos (one with Windows 95 OSR2 and the other with Windows 98SE).