| IBM ThinkPad 755CS | |
I tried playing some old DOS games on the 755CE. Turns out it's less than perfect for that, mainly due to sound issues. But briefly, let me first cover the track point issue, and the screen quality.
The trackpoint, simply put, doesn't work too great for twitch games. It's just not as responsive (at least by my hand) as a trackball or mouse. For slow paced games it's fine, but for things like Populous, it's not much better than using the keyboard. Perhaps with a lot more experience this preference would go away, but I'm sure it would take some training. Beyond control issues, it's just plain fatiguing to use the trackpoint for long periods of time. This is even true on my modern Dell laptop, which I use a lot, so I doubt that issue will go away with training.
As to the quality of the screen, it's quite good. I didn't get a chance to play anything that used a 640x480 mode, but all the mode 13h games looked and played great, whether fast twitch or slow and lush. In short, the LCD on this machine cannot be beat. It's ever so much better than trying to use a passive matrix display, like what my Twinhead 550S has.
Now, on to the main problem:
The sound chip IBM uses to simulate a sound blaster doesn't work too well. It's not all that compatible, and requires some hefty DLLs too. I managed to run with more than 600k free conventional memory only by booting with just emm386/himem, and the sound card drivers (ie, no smartdrive, drivespace, ect) under Dos 6.22. Even with plenty of free ram, it didn't work with everything. There were two versions of the emulation software, 2.24, and 1.09, I tried both, in general I didn't see a big difference, but here is what I did see, for a few games I tried:
Xargon: could play with just music under the 1.x drivers, would not load with any sound at all under 2.x
Lemmings (Xmass 94 version): title loads, but no sound, and game exits whenever you try to load a level.
Spell Casting 201: didn't work with 1.x, appears to work, but poorly with 2.x (ie, it complains, but seems to be fine)
Warlords 2, Populous, Power Monger, LGOP2, Lure of the Temptress: all work fine.
The Incredible Machine: fully playable, but seems to have some display issues, draws part of the screen double. I've seen this on my other portable, the Twinhead 550s. Looks odd, but really doesn't cause a problem. I suspect this has to do with TIM using a "mode X" VGA setting, which means non-standard resolution, and is something LCD display's just can't accommodate.
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