What Games Can You Play on a Netbook?

Overview

Can a humble Acer Aspire One netbook with a single-core Intel Atom N270 at 1.6GHz and just 1GB of RAM handle gaming? I test eight classic games on Windows XP to find out. From Doom 2 to Warcraft 3, from Quake 2 to SimCity 4, this tiny laptop proves that with the right game selection, netbooks can deliver surprisingly enjoyable retro gaming experiences. The key is disk defragmentation and choosing games from the right era - late 90s to early 2000s titles run beautifully.

Key Moments

• Testing Doom 2 with PC speaker sound (SoundBlaster emulation issues)
• Unreal running smooth in OpenGL at native 1024x600 resolution
• Quake 2 performing exceptionally well
• Command & Conquer Gold running perfectly
• Warcraft 3 fully playable - great for LAN parties with multiple netbooks
• Atari Arcade classics (Pong, Asteroids, Missile Command)
• SimCoaster and SimCity 4 loading and running
• The importance of disk defragmentation for loading times
• Multiple USB ports enable gamepad multiplayer for emulation

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey YouTube, I’m back here with one of my Acer Aspire One netbooks (sorry, netbook), and this time around instead of running Linux as I did in a previous video, I’m going to be showing you how some Windows games perform running in Windows XP.

As a reminder, this is a netbook that has a single core Atom N270 CPU. It’s running at 1.6 gigahertz and it’s multi-threaded, so it shows up as having two threads. It’s got one gig of RAM, and as far as I can tell, this machine can’t be upgraded even though it has a memory slot underneath. I’ve tried using two gig sticks and it doesn’t take them.

It’s got a 160 gig hard drive. I’ve tried an SSD and I’ll probably make a video making a comparison of this laptop running on a regular spinning hard drive and an SSD to see if there’s any performance differences. But for now it’s got a single hard drive.

On the side here it has two USB ports, the charge port, it’s got a webcam, and it’s got a memory card reader down here. On the other side over here it has microphone in, speaker out. Sorry, the SD card reader is right here in the front. It has a Wi-Fi on/off switch, it’s got another USB port right here, Ethernet, VGA out, and of course the battery’s in the back.

Overall, for the size of this thing, it’s got a whole lot of ports. I really love that it has one USB here and two on the other side. As a gaming machine, you can imagine - I’ve done it - you can put a gamepad on this side and a gamepad on that side and run some emulation software like for Nintendo or Sega and battle it out.

But in this video what I’m going to do is show you some other cool games like Quake, Unreal, Doom, SimCity, and Command and Conquer. So let’s get started.

[Proceeds through all game demonstrations]

All right, so this is Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3, and I have installed some software here that I’m going to show you. I’ve installed Command & Conquer Gold, SimCity 4, SimCoaster, Winamp, Atari Arcade, Unreal, Quake 2, Warcraft 3, X-Wing Alliance, and Doom 2.

The only one here that I’m not going to be able to show you is X-Wing Alliance because that one requires that I have a joystick and I currently don’t have one, so I’m going to skip that one. But I’m going to start off with showing Doom 2.

For DOS games, sometimes the SoundBlaster emulation works well, sometimes it doesn’t. In Doom 2, I noticed that it does not work very well, so what I’ve done is I changed it so that it uses the PC speaker. But as you can see, it loaded up very fast and performance is very nice.

[Demonstrates each game in turn]

One of the things that I did to speed up some of the loading times on this computer is: I defragmented the hard drive after installing Windows and all the software. I went ahead and used the built-in Windows XP defragmenter to defragment the disk, and that helps a lot with loading because it makes all the files sequentially accessible.

[Continues with game demonstrations]

I hope you enjoyed seeing these old nostalgic games being played… well, being tested, not played. If you like this kind of content, be sure to subscribe and hit the bell so you’re notified whenever I upload a new video. I’m going to be doing a lot more retro computers and classic cars and car repair videos, so if you’re into that stuff, be sure to subscribe. Thanks for watching!