Hardware Recommended retro laptop?

[Harsky]

Long story short, I have several Gameboy flashcards but they all need parallel ports to write games to them and instead of trying to get it to work on Windows 10, I might just grab a cheap 98/XP laptop.

Does anyone have any recommendations that not only has a parallel port but also quite powerful enough to run old PC games at max settings as well?

 

[DinohScene]

Don't want to hijack it but I'm also looking for a similar thing.
Preferably Pentium 3 range, Win 9x support.

 

[FAST6191]

Trouble is you are not the first to go here and the supply got run down about 6 or so years ago with this boom in the retro PC lark. Parallel ports stuck around for a while in a lot of things (business and tech users still wanted them), even more so if you find a docking station -- my docking station for a core2 era DDR2 sporting Dell laptop I was still using as my main machine last week and for years prior has one. That also places you comfortably in SATA hdd territory so SSDs are easy to source (IDE SSD or CF is... not fun), though be sure to find out about the TRIM commands. You might also get lucky there and have a GPU of some merit (though do check recalls, lawsuits and general failures here) where before most things would be Intel, maybe Via way back in the day (so basically as good as intel) and not much else saving the CAD desktop replacement workstation things that will be a fortune today. Alternatively on the GPU front you can potentially go in for the external graphics card stuff (people took to ripping out the wifi card and as it is PCI or some flavour you can get a slow take on a desktop graphics card if you are so inclined).

Still IBM's business laptops of the time were pretty sweet. While Lenovo has since done all it can to piss the reputation away this was what made them not a household name but the go to option for a lot of businesses.

If you have pockets deep enough for a vintage toughbook then by all means.

Depending upon what you do you could also find yourself with a laptop with a nice amount of screen resolution.

Basically it is the same as today. If it is the business, rugged, workstation or super high end business line of laptops from a major vendor it is probably good stuff, built to last and spare parts are also a thing, not to mention a nice docking station is usually on the cards. If it has otherwise decent specs and an unknown vendor you might get something going on. If it is a consumer level or worse from a known brand it is probably trash, and if it is an unknown brand and mediocre specs it is almost certainly flimsy super trash. Most of the major players in the 98-2000 era are still major players today (the IBM-Lenovo being the main change, the rise of Sony is a thing but that just means you won't find anything and the more recent move to semi obscurity of Fujitsu (Siemens) even if they still play is a thing I guess).

 

[Harsky]

Well the hunt was short lived. Turns out my parents had actually never thrown away a 2003 Toshiba Satellite M10 laptop and that came with the "elusive" parallel port.

Hard drive is broken though so is there any modern IDE hard drive solutions or should I just buy a "top of the range back in the day" hard drive?

 

[FAST6191]

Be careful buying a top of the line one -- while it was more for SATA some of the big boy stuff was a bit taller than the average slot. Should be fine as far as BIOS goes though.
You might also be able to boot off USB (or from CD which redirects to USB).

Otherwise three main options
1) Buy whatever nice IDE laptop drive is still out there and has the specs and reviews you want
2) There is such a thing as an IDE SSD drive. Stuck around for a while and some shops still stock them for legacy purposes (a lot of diagnostic tools still use IDE)
3) CF cards are electrically/communications wise IDE. To that end you can get simple adapters to turn them into IDE. Their IOPS usually suck and write speed is not great but being flash memory they are usually pretty robust and their straight read speed is great too. That said a modern CF card and not wanting to use it as a daily with 900 tasks going at once will probably be just fine.

Not sure offhand what became of hybrid SSD laptop drives but be careful if you do go there as a lot of those had a habit of kicking the bucket early on.

Depending upon what goes then 2003 might also be new enough that things were internally SATA but adapted to IDE for reasons.

Some also see if there are adapters that take the place of the DVD drive and allow you to shove a hard drive in that.

Going into the crazy exotic then that appears to have a PC card/PCMCIA slot and there are some things you can do with those.
Some docking stations will also have some measure of hard drive support for things, though I don't know what goes here specifically. Quick scan of what is out there (sub £10 too which is nice) says probably not but does have ps/2 keyboard and mouse out, serial, parallel, dvi port, few more USB ports and more but seemingly no drives (I think that was more Dell's thing).