Will this laptop's sound card play older dos games?

[traxxton]

I have been looking for an older laptop just to install windows 98 on and play older dos games on such as; doom, duke nukem, tera nova, strife, blood, redneck rampage, descent, and many others. I always had trouble with sound output and getting it to work. Anyways, theres a nice Thinkpad 240 for sale in the fs forum im looking at. Seller says it has a ESS SOLO-1 1946 for sound. I havent actually ran these older games in sometime, but I think I remember something about ess solo as an option. A google search came up with a compaq ess solo dos emulation driver, but Im not sure if it would work or if its needed.

Would the ESS SOLO-1 1946 provide good support for most (if not all) older dos games?

The laptop im look at is;
Thinkpad 240 2609-31U
10.4 SVGA TFT 800X600 LCD screen
Pentium II Mobile Intel Celeron 366MHz (128KB L2 Cache)
96MB SDRAM
6.4GB IBM Hardrive
56k Lucent Win Modem
Graphics: NeoMagic MagicGraph 128XD NM2160
Sound: ESS SOLO-1 1946
1 USB Controller
2 Serial ports/1 Parallel port

Thanks

 

[DaveSimmons]

I had a 240, it's sweet little _3 lb_ laptop.

I never used it for games but I can say most DOS games required Soundblaster emulation and did not support ESS natively. I don't remember whether IBM offered DOS or Windows software for DOS soundblaster emulation.

Also, it does not have a built-in CD-ROM, so you may have trouble getting the external drive that the seller has (or a drive you buy yourself) to work in DOS.

Finally, you'll need to use an external monitor for many DOS games, because the image scaling of 640x480 resolution (the max for many DOS games) is _awful_ on the 800x600 LCD.

... you might be better off getting a KVM switch and putting together a junk parts desktop for DOS. FS/FT is filled with cheap stuff, or a WTB post there could get people like me to offer up some of the old stuff we have gathering dust.