How will this card do for some older games?

I am considering purchase of an older laptop that I can load Windows 98 on to play some older games, at least one of which I have run into compatibility issues with W7 and XP. The games I would be playing on this platform would be from the late 90s, such as Jane's USNF, Jane's IAF, Half-Life (original), Rainbow Six (original).

The GPU in the systems I am considering is an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 4X AGP with 32MB of memory. I've looked at notebookcheck.net and the description says it is "sufficient" for games like Quake 3 Arena, which is from the era of games that I'd be playing. Wanted to see though if any of you have thoughts on the card and it's game playing capabilities. Other specs in the two systems I'm considering (one is a Compaq Evo n610c and one is a Dell Latitude C640) include 512GB RAM, and either a 1.7 or 2.0 GHz processor. I think those specs should be able to handle most late 90s games.

 

GPU sounds pretty weak, even for Half-Life 1.

But why bother? You can play HL1, or better yet, HL1: Source on a modern PC no problem, and I'm sure it's the same for Rainbow Six. And there are often fixes available for old games which have problems running in Win7. Alternatively, you can just run Win98 in a VM. DOS games work great in DOSbox. Buying a crappy laptop for Win98 isn't the best idea.

 

Thanks for your feedback. Believe me, I share your feeling that buying an old laptop shouldn't be the first choice. Unfortunately I have not been able to overcome some compatibility challenges with some of my software, and I've come to the conclusion that having an older laptop on hand for some of my older software is a viable solution. I do have another platform humming along with DosBox and other solutions for some software. That doesn't work with everything though. And VM hasn't worked for me in the past. I ran into issues with the virtual machine recognizing the GPU (granted this was a W7 computer running VM XP--can you even run Win98 in VM??).

The Radeon 7500 does seem "pretty weak" compared to modern cards, but I had an old Sony Vaio with a GeForce 4 420 Go, which seems fairly comparable. The old GeForce was able to handle games like the original Call of Duty (2003), so I'm hoping the Radeon 7500 may be able to handle some late 90s games? Anyone ever have a comp with the 7500?

 

I had an ibm r40 I bought in 2004 for a bargain price of £250 with pentium m 1.3ghz centrino 2gb ram 80gb hdd ati mobility 7500 32mb and 15" 1400x1050 res screen and 2 batteries one which last 8 hours. Incredible bargain at the time. I remember when I bought this when the 2004 athens games were being played.

I even used a dell c640 and they are ok but they have a pentium 4 cpu. I know they are mobile ones but get a pentium m with ati 9200. I had one of these hp zt3000 and it had a 64mb 9200 with pm 1.5ghz and it was decent for gaming. Should play old games as well.

 

Sure you can run Win98 in a VM. Heck, it even runs in DOSbox (but that's not very efficient). Should be a much better solution than an ancient laptop.
Before that, try running your software in compatibility mode and google for fixes.

If all else fails, here's your answer. ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphic drivers? - Yahoo! Answers

 

Back in the day, I had a Dell Inspiron with the 440 Go and a 1920x1200 screen. I would take the system to work and play the original Unreal on my lunch breaks. Good times.

To answer your question, that GPU should be more than enough for old games, but again, you should at least try to find fixes and use a virtual machine or DOSBox first. You'd be surprised at what's compatible. I can get Carmageddon 2 to run perfectly in Windows 7 with a Glide wrapper, setting compatibility to Windows 98 on the .exe file, and forcing 640x480 resolution, which is what the game runs at anyway.

 

Thanks everyone for your help and advice! Again, I have experimented with VM and DOSBox. DOSBox has most of my old software working just fine, but not all of the stuff. Jane's IAF won't run in DOSBox. VM had issues with the GPU, at least when running XP. I have not tried a Win98 VM though, so I can give that a try and see what happens. Compatibility modes for Win98 and Win95 (with experimentation with all of the settings there--resolution, colors, etc.) did not fix the problems I was having.

This all gives me some stuff to go on though, so I will see about a VM with Win98. Rep all 'round!

 

Indeed. Even Dungeon Keeper 2 a 1998 game runs perfectly in Win 7. Just needs a tweak or two in regedit to make it play 100% stable.

Generally you just need to read up well to make old software run well. Often there are good tutorials on youtube for certain games as I found for DK2 on how to change the game setting in registry. Usually the problem lies in hardware acceleration needing to be forced off on newer machines as the GPU's nowadays are so powerful.

 

Jane's IAF might be the one thing you'll never get running in a modern environment. It seems the devs used some "underhanded" (for lack of a better word) tricks to get the game running way back when. I'd say you could just try a Glide emulator, but apparently the game only calls it when you're actually in a mission. The menus still don't work right.

It looks like someone did a workaround for the USAF game to get it running on Windows 7, but unfortunately you might be SOL with IAF.