DOS Gaming on an Acer Aspire One Netbook

Overview

Can you turn an old netbook into a portable DOS gaming machine? I installed Lubuntu Linux and DOSBox on an Acer Aspire One with an Intel Atom N270 1.6GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM. In this video, I run benchmarks from Phil’s Computer Lab and test various DOS classics including Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Heretic, Death Rally, and Wolfenstein 3D. Spoiler: it performs like a 486 DX at 80MHz, and most games run surprisingly well!

Key Moments

• Acer Aspire One specs: Intel Atom N270 dual-core 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, VGA out, Ethernet
• Extended battery makes it bulky but portable
• Tried DOS 7.0 first but couldn’t get AC97 sound drivers working
• Installed Lubuntu Linux with DOSBox instead
• DOS Benchmark Pack results: performs like 486 DX at 80MHz (various tests disagree)
• Doom 2: runs very well, smooth gameplay
• Wolfenstein 3D: runs faster than Doom, excellent performance
• Heretic: playable but keyboard is challenging (tiny keys)
• Death Rally: top-down racing game works great
• Duke Nukem 3D: shareware LA Meltdown runs fairly well despite not being highest resolution

Full Transcript (Edited)

[Music]

Hey YouTube, today I’m going to be showing you one of my little projects with this netbook. This is an Acer Aspire One, one of those early inexpensive netbooks that runs an Intel Atom CPU. This came originally with Windows XP, and this unit has the extended battery installed, so it looks a little bit bulky in the back, but it’s a nice little compact case.

As you can see, it’s a little package that has VGA out, an Ethernet port here, USB, audio, and an SD card reader. On the other side it has the AC adapter charge port right there and it has two USBs. In the back, things are easy to access. You have the hard drive underneath this cover and RAM underneath this cover. I believe this one has a wireless adapter in there, but I’m maybe wrong about that one—I haven’t opened that cover.

I want to show you what I did with this particular unit. I wanted to see if I could make this into a retro gaming laptop. I tried installing DOS 7.0 to see if I can get drivers for the sound working on this, but it has one of those AC97 Windows-only sound cards, and getting drivers for them that work under DOS proved to be very difficult. There might be ways that you can do that—I know there’s a USB DOS driver out there, but that’s mostly to set up external CD-ROM drives or flash drives so you can access them from DOS as a disk. I couldn’t find any drivers that were using that interface for creating sound. This laptop unfortunately doesn’t have any parallel port, so I can’t just install one of those parallel port AdLib cards to have a true native DOS experience.

What I did instead was I installed Lubuntu Linux on this, and I’m using DOSBox, and it actually performs really well. I’m going to go over it with you. I’m going to load it up and then we’ll try some of the benchmarks and games that I have installed here.

[Boot up]

Alright, so let’s get started. We’re up! On this screen you can see the Linux desktop. Like I said, this is Lubuntu. I’m going to run the terminal here to see what the CPU information is. This is a dual-core Atom N270 and it’s running at 1.6 gigahertz or 800 megahertz if it’s on battery power. But it’s got two cores. It’s not a speed demon by any means, but it’s a 32-bit CPU, and this netbook has one gig of RAM, which for a DOS machine is more than plenty because I’m only using 16 megabytes for running the DOS games.

I’m using DOSBox and I set it up so that I start up in full screen when I load up DOSBox, and I mount a folder called “dos_c_drive” as the main drive. Then I have the autoexec going to C. If I check my directory on the C drive, I have several things installed: Doom 2, a bunch of DOS benchmarks, Death Rally, Duke 3D, Heretic, and Wolf 3D.

Let’s go to DOS Bench really quick so we can take a look at how this performs. This is a DOS Benchmark Pack by Phil’s Computer Lab, and it has a bunch of things here that you can try. I was experimenting with this laptop and playing with the speed settings for DOSBox. DOSBox allows you to change how much CPU time you give to DOSBox. Right now it’s in automatic mode.

I noticed that this computer performs like it can perform up to like a Pentium 60 megahertz. If I go to Landmark here, it says that it’s a 486—this computer performs like an 80 megahertz 486 with a 400 megahertz 80287. It’s an Intel 486 DX with a CPU clock of 107 megahertz. These benchmarks don’t really are not that accurate, but as you can see the computer performs really well according to this benchmark.

If I go to System Information here, it says that it’s a 486 DX running at 54 megahertz. Numbers here are different. It’s got a basic VGA card, PS/2, and it’s got 16 megs of RAM. If I go to Benchmark CPU Speed right now, it says that it’s a 486 running at 80 megahertz and it gets about 36-37 points. But this is all in automatic mode, so this benchmark is not really realistic.

[Running various benchmarks with video footage]

Alright, so now I’m going to show you some of the games. Let’s start with Doom 2. You can see the sound works really nicely and it works really good. I’m not the best player, but performance is adequate.

[Doom 2 gameplay footage]

So it’s a portable machine for playing Doom games and things like that—does pretty well. Let’s quit this and we can go to the next game. The next game is Wolfenstein 3D, which is less demanding than Doom, so it should do a great job with this. This works really well and fast.

[Wolfenstein 3D gameplay]

Alright, that was it for that. Let’s try Heretic.

[Heretic gameplay]

Okay, this also runs very well. Faster—oh my God, I’m dying! This is awful. One thing that this computer does have that I don’t like is a really tiny small keyboard, so it’s very easy to press the wrong key, especially with the fact that the Control, Alt, and Function keys are really tiny, and the arrow keys are super tiny as well. So you can easily press the wrong key. It isn’t happening to me right now, but in the past it does happen.

Let’s try Death Rally before we go to Duke 3D. This is a cool little game with a pseudo-3D effect as well. I’m always impressed with what they were able to do back in the ’90s without real 3D acceleration in hardware.

[Death Rally gameplay]

Alright, so you see this is a top-down view of a race. Oh, something happened to my car! It works really well. Again, I think the issue with this game is the person playing the game is not that good. I’m going to exit this again. My goal is just to show that these games work very very well and are performant. If you’d like to see any games that you have in mind—any DOS games that you’d like for me to try here or any other applications—let me know in the comments.

And now the final one is Duke 3D. This is the shareware version.

[Duke Nukem 3D gameplay]

New game, LA Meltdown. “Let’s rock!” As you can see, it works fairly well. I think this is not the highest resolution, but definitely very playable.

That’s it! Let me know what you think. If you think I should try something else, let me know. Subscribe if you’d like to see this kind of stuff. I do a lot of weird experiments with old hardware, and I’m planning some other videos with this machine and other machines. Maybe I’ll try again to get Windows XP installed on this machine and then try these DOS games under Windows XP to see if I can get the sound working, and then we can compare what the performance difference is between DOSBox and native DOS—well, DOS running under Windows XP.

Let me know if you’d like to see some of that, and until next time!