If you enjoy the earlier years of PC Gaming
You may find yourself wanting to get a computer to play those games on instead of using an emulator such as DOSBox
But this brings up the question is old as computers are themselves. Do you build or buy?
Now since the PC Standard has been around for nearly 40 years
It can be difficult to know what kind of parts you need to build a computer to play those games
There are a lot of parts options out there that make it a daunting task
You need to start by choosing an appropriate
CPU for the types of games you want to play and then you need to pick a Motherboard
And RAM and a video card and a power supply
And a floppy drive and a hard drive and cables and maybe a CD drive but oh wait
That's SCSI and the complexity of the build just keeps growing
so for the majority of people building a computer is going to be complicated and expensive and
the option of buying a computer is going to be better and
There isn't much better of a way of buying a computer than a laptop
It's small compact
Functional everything set up and connected in the way it needs to be and they're usually quite affordable
although these aren't too particularly great examples of affordable the Gateway Liberty 2000 here is
unobtainium and the ThinkPad 365 XP for some reason unbeknownst to me can sell for up to
$300 on eBay but you could easily find computers like these for more real-world prices
Now these two computers represent
What I think is the most important decision you will have to make when choosing a laptop
Do you go for a 486 or a Pentium going with a 486 laptop will give you pretty robust DOS and windows 3.1.
Compatibility, although you will run into problems running some much older games that are expecting an 808 as it will run too fast
But almost any computer is going to have that problem
That isn't an early 80s luggable
Now if you're going with a Pentium era laptop, you're going to further decrease your compatibility with DOS games
But you will get compatibility with Pentium games
But you can take this to the next step and get a Pentium laptop with a 3d accelerator card
But then you're getting into Windows 98 games and that's not really the point of this
So the choice between a Pentium laptop and a 486 is really going to what exact era of games you want to play I think
Most people are going with 486 laptops because it seems more
DOS like and it feels like it's going to be more compatible with stuff
There's also a little bit of romanticizing going on with the 486 and people just seem to like it more now
there is one pretty significant advantage about the Pentium era laptops that I've left out so far and that is
sound
You aren't going to be able to find a 486 laptop of sound
So the best it's going to be able to muster is PC speaker
Now despite that which is a pretty significant thing people still seem to be drawn to 486 laptops
Even I have to agree with this and as soon as I got this 486 laptop
I found myself searching for a way of adding sound to it
which led me on a quest that lasted over a year to try and get this a
Micro Solutions Backpack CD Drive with Sound now before we open this
I want to take a look at a few other ways something similar to this has been done in the era
There were parallel port connectable sound cards such as the Disney Sound Source or the Covox speech thing more recently
There's also been the OPL2LPT adapter unlike the other two sound solutions
I mentioned which require support to be natively included in the game the OPL2 to LPT
Adapter allows you to use any game that was AdLib compatible
All you have to do is run a program to redirect AdLib
Access or change to the program to access the ad lib card over the parallel port now the OPL2 to LPT
adapter is originally based on a project that mounted an ISA bus directly to a parallel port to use with an
Original AdLib card the AdLib card is an 8-bit Sound Card in the parallel port is an 8-bit
Interface, so it was very possible to make an ad lib card work over the parallel port now
that's great for older games that used ad lib newer games tend to use Sound Blaster cards and while there were
8-bit sound blaster cards
those were more geared towards music what you really want when you want a sound blaster for games is a sound blaster 16 a
16-bit is a slot sound card
Now this cannot be easily connected to a parallel port because it has twice as many interface pins
So it hasn't really been possible to make an adapter for that
So the fact that backpack was able to fit a 16-bit Sound Card on the 8-bit parallel port has what made this thing?
So tantalizing and why I've been trying to get one for so long
Well, actually I haven't been trying to get that
I've been trying to get one of these with sound which also exists the thinner later model that more easily fits in a laptop bag
now I bet I've missed some of these on eBay that had the 16-bit sound option because it seems people only take pictures of the
Front bottom in the back when the sound connections are on the side
These two extra connections would be for audio in and audio out
But I've never seen one of these available for sale with the 16-bit sound
So I was just happy to get any of them with the sound option
Even if it was the larger desktop size drive which despite their claims of being portable
I'm going to argue because I've never had a laptop bag. That would hold something this large easily enough
So yeah, I'm calling this a desktop only model. I don't care what the box says
Now what you get in the box with the drive is about what you would expect a cable a manual and drivers
A power supply and of course the drive itself
mine just happened to also come with some documents detailing an RMA process for it and
Some new beta drivers that I don't think we're ever officially released for OS/2 Warp
By the time you've seen this already imaged all these and put them up somewhere for you to download
So if you want to check those out go ahead, but I'm not gonna be looking at those in this video in here
we finally have the CD drive itself with the sound card connections on the back a
Little interesting fact about the sound card inside of here
Is that while you could obviously get it?
integrated into the CD Drive like this when you bought the CD drive you could also get the CD drive without
The sound card in there and you would have a blank metal plate back here
You could then buy the sound car as an upgrade for your CD drive and install it yourself
Which means if we open it up we can actually get a look at the sound card and take it out
Now as we take this out of here
Not only can we see that this was a sound card connected to the parallel port bus
The internal sound card is actually connected to the IDE channel that the CD drive is on
So it's a 16-bit parallel port sound card connected to an IDE adapter
This thing is weird. And now that it's out of these CD drive we can see what's going on in here
So we have what is a PC speaker so we can have that emulated we have a gal chip
That's just going to be doing some basic logic conversion all the requisite
ports for input and output and a volume control knob and at the heart of everything we have an audio drive chipset sound chip in
ES1688 F
This is going to be a Sound Blaster compatible chip which is what allows it to be a 16-bit sound card
It's still very strange that it's connected to a parallel port over a nice a bus to finally be here though
I think someone missed the memo here on what a to-220 screw mount is actually for all right
I think I've kept you waiting for long enough
So let's get this thing connected to and installed on the 486 laptop. The driver installation process is pretty unspectacular
so we'll just go ahead and fast-forward through that and
on to the first boot up
[Windows 95 startups]
Welp and there we have it it works
That's uh, that's good, right? We're done now it works
You don't need to see games, right?
Do you?
Alright,
Here's where we get to the real problem with this thing and why everyone isn't using one of these for their old 486 laptops?
Let's take a look at the manual for a moment
If we look in the manual will find installation instructions for Windows 3.1 in Windows 95
But no mention of DOS
Because the sound portion of the CD drive is not compatible with DOS
But the back of the box clearly states these system requirements are only DOS 3.1 a dost compatible computer in that
Dos and windows device drivers are included
but all of that is just
for the CD drive not the sound portion matter of fact, it makes all these bold claims and
Nowhere on the Box does it state that the sound portion of this device is only compatible with Windows?
Now Windows applications do work just fine on this
But if you attempt to configure something like Doom to use a Sound Blaster
All of the requisite settings and try and launch the game
You will see that nothing happens at all sound wise
And
it's really a shame that the drivers are windows only because it means that the Pentium era PC with its integrated sound card and
capability of using it in DOS makes for a better DOS gaming PC with sound
Now all that's not to say there aren't some great games that fall in the cross section of stuff that will still run on a
486 but requires Windows 95
It's just that for pre Pentium laptops this CD drive with a sound board crammed in there
Doesn't really do enough to warrant getting one now. Let's say you're a crazy person. Who knows the
limitations of this device before you buy it like I actually did and
You still want one of these?
Well, let's go ahead and take a look at what this thing can actually do now on the bottom left here
We have a CD audio output
That is a legacy output because of the CD drive nature of this the CD audio is passed through
the other audio ports so you don't need to connect anything to that we have an AUX in which is kind of a
Relic of a bygone era that just passes an audio source through to the outputs. So
You can use that if you want. There's no real reason if you were
Have this thing connected to some kind of MIDI synthesizer
I don't know how then I guess you could pass audio from that through into here
But again, it's a parallel port sound card. There's no MIDI output
Anyway, continuing we have a microphone recording in put a line in recording input line out
Which is not controlled by the volume knob and a speaker output
Which is controlled by the volume knob now the speaker inside I mentioned earlier is not actually a PC speaker
it is just an internal speaker effectively connected to the
Speaker output on here the volume knob controls the volume of the internal speaker and the volume of that output
we have the connection to the computer a connection to a printer not a
floppy drive like my sub notebook uses because the
Parallel port is merely a connector with a bunch of pins as far as that's concerned
So keep that in mind if you're gonna use something like this
I cannot use the floppy drive and this at the same time without a switch box
We have an 18 volt AC power supply
Although I've read that you can put a DC power supply into it of an equivalent voltage
I have not tested that and will not be testing that because that sounds a bit scary to me and we have a
Flip power switch for turning the unit off and on now. The CD Drive itself is very unremarkable
It is only a 2 times speed drive. So it's going to feel very slow
The Slim Drives are much better. If you just need to add a CD drive to one of these old computers
That's a 24 speed drive
so it's just gonna blow away this thing and
Fit in a bag much more conveniently matter of fact if you just need a CD drive
I very much recommend the slim drives over one of the big drives
They're very common in affordable to get I haven't paid more than $20 for one of these matter of fact
They're so easy to get I've accidentally acquired two of them. From what I've used these they're very reliable. Neither of these are broken and
They're just faster. They're better. One of these slim drives with a sound option is still something
I want to get even though I know it's useless
I'm gonna have one of these in my laptop bag since the sub. Notebook doesn't have a CD drive
So why not have one with the sound option for the limited times?
I do want to play a Windows 95 game that runs on a 486
Now I haven't had any problems with sampled sounds from this those sound just fine
The CD audio is nice and crisp. No skipping and the MIDI is all right
let me go ahead and put in the
Windows 95 version of Doom 2 and do some direct capture of that so you can hear what the MIDI sounds like clearly
So, yep the MIDI sounds alright, but if we go into control panel
we can take a look at some of the settings for the backpack and we can go into configure sound and
Here, we have a very interesting option to use OPL3
Now, I don't know about you, but I didn't see an OPL3 chip on that board when we took a look at it
So it must be doing some kind of OPL3
emulation
Well, let's check out how that sounds
So, yeah, that's clearly OPL3 emulation on the Backpack
That's pretty cool or you know all those AdLib games for Windows 95
Still though nice to have
Well, that's pretty much everything
I wanted to cover about the sound enabled Backpack CD drive when this thing was relevant
It would have been really awesome to be able to add sound to a computer like this
I mean you would have been using Windows 95 as your daily driver operating system to do Word Excel, you know
All that stuff you could play music files through it. It's it would have been very useful
Nowadays, though
we see this and we want it for games and it's
just not there for the majority of games that you would want to play on this computer because of the lack of das support and
The windows 95 support really is there's gonna be a better off with a Pentium laptop. So
Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense to try and hunt one of these down just for a 486 laptop
But if you stumble upon one
You know, it might be worth checking out. I hope you guys enjoyed that and I'll see you next time
Subtitle By Kenan