Well, so much for not going for old hardware. Found this little beast for like 30 bucks:
This is a laptop from early 2004 - Mobile Pentium 4 @ 3.06 Ghz, Geforce FX 5600, 512 MB Ram.
- It's in great shape - it was kept in great condition, keyboard is not gross, insides are immaculate, no buildup on the heatsinks and vents. Still gave it a thorough cleaning obviously, but I'm impressed.
- 4:3 screen - that's honestly a must for me. It's also pretty decent, nice brightness, contrast + colors.
- It's a WinXP machine, obviously, but everything in here does have Windows 9x drivers, so a Windows 98 install is definitely in the cards.
- In that era, Athlons were definitely preferable to Pentiums. But in terms of old Windows gaming I'm mostly interested in games pre circa 2002, so that doesn't really matter for me. Everything I've tested so far has run like a dream.
- It's pretty huge for a 15" laptop. A real chonker this one. This was definitely meant as a desktop replacement, not really made for lugging around. Also the battery is dead, but that's to be expected. That's fine with me though, I don't need portability for this. I'll probably hook this up with an external monitor, mouse + keyboard anyways.
- It's got USB, which makes data transfer pretty painless.
- I will definitely make some modifications, like replacing the hard drive with an SD to IDE adapter. The drive is definitely showing its age at this point. I'll probably store SD card images with clean WinXP + Win98 installs, and swap as needed.
- The one major snag is obviously the lack of glide support. No Voodoo, no Glide, as Bob Marley used to sing. That's definitely an issue with a few 90's games. But alas, can't have everything.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with this one. Probably gonna become my main retro gaming machine for a bit.