http://www.cnet.com/products/compaq-armada-1560d-12-1-p-mmx-16-mb-ram-3-2-gb/specs/ found this old laptop when walking to pick my nephew up from school yesterday if you need more info on specs i will post them its running windows 98se has 80mb ram and 1gb hdd i was thinking of putting windows 95 on it to be able to have more space for games but for now ill keep windows 98se so what would be some good games i should get note the when playing really fast games the screen has a ghosting effect and screen goes kinda blurry not sure if there is a fix for that
Original XCOM 1-3, Laser Squad, HoMM 1-3 and pretty much every other turn-based strategy/tactics game then. For fast games there's only one "fix" - external CRT or IPS LCD monitor.
Wolfenstein 3D, Lemmings, Jazz Jackrabbit, Fury of the Furries (aka Pac in Time), Alley Cat, Digger, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem 3D, The Incredible Machine, Warcraft, The Lost Vikings, Worms, Digger Remastered, Dynablaster, Monkey Island, Cannon Fodder, and many, many others.
Might as well have asked 'what's the best games released before the mid-nineties'. Answer: Way too many to list, since the only ones you excluded (implicitly, because you mentioned the bad screen) are the action titles. Do you have any favorite genres? I'm partial to adventures, so: Everything from Lucas Arts, Sierra, Legend Entertainment. Dungeon crawlers are awesome too, like Westwood Games' Lands of Lore series (for beginners), or the Eye of the Beholder titles. How about checking out the "Skyrim of '94", Elder Scrolls: Arena? Or the followup, Daggerfall (a much better game than the first - but why not try both, they're free!)
Yeah, you'll need an external monitor to play a lot of these games (notable exception of XCOM which is one of the best games ever). I did a RPG Makering when I had a Pentium 133 laptop with one of those screens. Some I haven't seen listed yet are Betrayal at Krondor, the Crusader series, Fallout, Mechwarrior 2, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, Rise of the Triad, Strife, System Shock, TIE Fighter, Terra Nova: Strike Force Centauri, and Tyrian 2000 (free at GOG). That was just me picking some of my favorites out of my GOG library. I won't say "DOS was a great platform", but it sure did have a ton of great games.
Demo archives can still be found online right? I had made most of my gaming decisions back then by trying demos from magazines and such.
Sure. archive.org has lots and lots of DOS software to try right in your browser (often even the full version, and with a download option), as well as images of magazine CDs and other stuff like that.
An older 4:3 TN screen can actually be better in some respect for DOS games, because a lot of them run in 70 Hz and most IPS/VA screens are 60 Hz max, so you'd get stutter instead of smooth scrolling. There's the newer Adaptive Sync monitors with 144 Hz support of course, but a lot of them won't support these low resolutions correctly and not offer a 4:3 aspect for them. So really only a CRT is perfect for these games.
