Finally got one of these again. I had a 100LX like 20 years ago and sold it on eBay. I stumbled across this near mint 200LX and just had to splurge again. An actual MSDOS pocket PC. I have so much cool stuff to load on here.
Absolutely ZERO enshittification here.
@Lydie I don't know what it is about these things that still, today, seems so neat to me. I mean, these days I can emulate a more powerful system than that on my phone. Why should I care? But darn it, they're still just NEAT!
I can tell you that I would have absolutely killed to have had one of those when I was young. No, like seriously, time travelers, be ready to defend yourselves if you carry one back. 😆
@Lydie It definitely should. The 186 should definitely beat out at 8088 as far as I know. Not quite a 286, but still improvements.
Though really the dream for me back then would have been a pocket device like this that could do color VGA and sound and everything for real gaming. 😆
@Lydie I'm still confused why they limited the heck out of the original Book 8088 model. A lot of arbitrary limitations for no discernible reason I could come up with.
Really there does seem to be no point in doing less than a 486. Honestly I'd argue even a Pentium level chip makes the most sense (yes even for DOS! A lot of DOS stuff benefited meaningfully from a Pentium!) Or, you know, a K5 or Cyrix or whatever. It's ok if it's not great at Quake. 😆
I do think maybe 640x480 max makes sense (and it shouldn't be widescreen at all) but all in all the limitations just don't make sense. Like why not at least a SB Pro for sound (I know SB16 is, for some reason, hard to do, though I never understood why, but everything and its mother did SB Pro.)
@Lydie DOS gaming? I'm not sure what in DOS truly benefited from a Pentium II. The highest game I can really think of would be TES: Redguard (which had a Windows installer but actually ran in DOS) but even it only calls for a P1 — albeit a 166MHz MMX model. It might benefit from a P2, but only barely I guess.
Really most things in the P2 era were already on Windows by then.
@Lydie Looks like that one only claims to require a 90MHz P1, though it says it directly benefits from at least 133MHz. It sounds like it wouldn't actually require a P2 to pretty much go all out. EDIT: Correction, the manual says "any Pentium PC" rather than specifically P-90 for the bare minimum. But it does specifically recommend 133MHz.
Actually, I'd argue rigging up some sort of Voodoo acceleration might be better for "peak DOS gaming." Though that's probably unrealistic. (Emulation can do it, but I guess a machine like this would have to do some kind of FPGA. But I don't think anyone has even started to try to figure out how to actually do that with FPGA. I'm sure it absolutely could be done, but presumably would take quite some time...)
@Lydie Sweet. Sounds like it's just waiting to happen then.
Even that game had a patch for 3DFx support if I'm reading right. That would probably make it run smoothly and look good in 640x480 at least (I mean we're talking about a small screen and a realistic DOS era target) on even a slow P1.
A good, fast P1 with MMX would be best or a really slow P2 and toss in that and something actually decent for sound (not just FM only!) and you've got a setup that would be the ultimate DOS machine.
@nazokiyoubinbou I've got a Pentium-M 600 paired with a Voodoo 2, so now I have a new challenge. t/y
@Lydie Hah.
Well, bear in mind you may have to use a slowdown tool with some things. A Pentium M is already darned powerful, but at 600MHz I don't think you could underclock it enough and it actually post. (You'd probably have to get it crazy low like 75MHz or something to not break a lot of DOS stuff. I couldn't get a P2 to post below 166 if that gives you a rough idea of scale.)
@Lydie Oh I just meant in general. That game likely would be fine.
And hey, a lot of the things that were problems were things that could be dealt with. A TSR that slowed the system to a near halt during initial startup got one past those Turbo Pascal (or whichever "Turbo" product it was) games to start, then you could press the shortcut to turn it off once it finished init.
I just meant in general you'll run into stuff here and there that may not like such a fast CPU in the DOS era.
@Lydie Isn't the only problem with it that it has to do its own memory management (eg basically just needs its own bootdisk)? Or does it run blazing fast? I suppose I never tried it on anything that fast.
To be fair, it was designed to run surprisingly well on a 386 in a 486 era.
@Lydie I did not know that was a thing...
Somewhere along the way I stopped being able to do hardware and just had to go with things like DOSBox and its successors.
To be fair though, I never had the sort of money it would take to have some of the nicer things that got quite costly even before they started getting so rare. Like a Roland SC-55 or later would have been a thing of beauty to have in DOS gaming, but wow buying one now (along with a SB16 of course. I can't do SB Pro. I just can't... I need 16-bit sound.) Well, all that Just Works™ in DOSBox (well, DOSBox-Staging for the SC-55, though the soundfont I had before the SC-55 emulator wasn't too shabby.)
@Lydie I wish I had the words to say how important what you just said truly is.
Just exactly as you say, DOSBox and 86Box are ultimate preservers of something that is basically otherwise going to be lost by sheer attrition if nothing else. I just wish we had their equivalent for the late 9x/early XP era. 86Box is the closest, but it's still working on reaching even just Voodoo3 level of graphics and Pentium 2 level of CPU emulation. We need at least Geforce 2 and P3/Athlon for a lot of stuff that's already basically getting really hard to run on anything modern. (I'm even having issues with Proton on a rare few such old games. Windows itself long ago decided it didn't care and people are cross-porting some Wine stuff just to fix some things...)
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