Hey all.

I'm not very tech savv, so I need some help. I now have big-boxes ofall the previous TES games. Arena, Daggerfall, Battlespire and Redguard.

Now, Arena and Daggerfall can be played pretty well thanks to DosBox I know, but Battlespire has a few problems with it from what I recall trying to run it, and Redguard I beleive can only be half-completed.

So, I wish to get hold of a laptop (for easy storage) that I can dedicate entirely to older games and play the old TES as they were intended. However, I don't even know where to start. What OS? Windows 95? 98? And what sorts of specs? I'm worried that to run one I might end up with something that can't run the other.

Advice? I'm in the UK, so direct links to laptops that work are only good if they are UK sales.

I'd really appreciate some help.

You may have a problem buying a modern laptop and installing an ancient OS. There may not be drivers for the more recent devices, such as SATA drives etc. Maybe look for an older refurbished machine with an OS that's the same age.

I guess you could look for an old used laptop from the year 2000 or so and install Windows 98 on it, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/400MHz-CTX-EzBook-Time-953e-Laptop-Windows-2000-Office-Cheap-Bargain-/320891861198?pt=UK_Computing_Laptops_EH&hash=item4ab6a538ce.

I'm not really sure if it would be a very good idea though, lots of laptop monitors back then suffered from severe ghosting which is not a nice thing to have while gaming. And as ghastley pointed out, it might be hard to find drivers for the parts Windows 98 doesn't recognise on it's own. But you might be lucky

DOSBox is flaky because it tries to emulate both DOS-era PC hardware and the DOS kernel, and it only does each of those things moderately well. But I can almost guarantee you that a virtual machine, which only emulates hardware (and does a VERY good job at it, like 99.99%) would work just as well and wouldn't cost you anything to setup.

That machine would probably work with if you replaced Windows 2000 with 98SE. The key is machines with TFT displays like that one. The older/cheaper displays did indeed have so much ghosting games were unplayable. I had a 266 MHz Acer laptop in 1999 that would have been perfect for Arena/Daggerfall. It ran everything from 80s DOS games to Half-Life reasonably.

If I were going to get a laptop from that timeframe I'd aim for something where the drivers are easy to get. Dell is a good example. They don't take old drivers off their website, making it easy to work with their old machines.

Hm, i'm going to give a virtual machine a go, since if I can figure it out then it might be the least painful option. Thank you for the posts, especially the laptop, since if all else fails I can use its specs are a base to search on.

I play Battlespire on DosBox whit no issues. As for Redguard, it's badly done from technical point of view, so even if you set it up right you will still experience issues...

nevermind..