Hi everyone,

I just want to play Empire Earth, Age of Empires, Knight's and Merchant's and Caesar III on GOG. But I need a new laptop because my old one died. Which laptop do you recommend? I prefer a laptop with a HDMI-portal as I used to link my laptop to my monitor, keyboard and Pioneer boxes.


I thank you guys in advance!

All the best,
Umut

Pretty much any laptop from the last five to ten years will do, and bring way more power than you need for these games.
Older ones, too, btw - all you really have to check there, is if they already have a HDMI out (but that shouldn't be a problem).

These are so light and old that even older laptops would do (pretty much any), but I would recommend a laptop with Ryzen 3 if that's within your budget. A laptop with a fast Ryzen 3 has a pretty good integrated graphic card which gives you power enough for both 2d and some 3d games. Gives you something that last a little longer also.

If not, an intel is good enough for these older smaller titles but they generally aren't as good as a Ryzen when it comes to games.

However, I would recommend to stay away from anything that has a Pentium / Celeron. Today these are just crappy compared to the much much earlier versions which actually were fast enough for games and such. These will struggle with bigger programs and even some websites with heavy scripts, like videos, games, and image sliders (we can thank software bloatness for this).

I personally wouldn't go anything lower than a Ryzen 3 or a Core i3 (preferably an upper class one). Any of these will have an hdmi port as it's pretty much standard.


EDIT: It's difficult to recommend a specific model as there are so many out there and we don't know where you will buy the laptop / which hot shops are in your area.

I bet even my chromebooks could run those games decently. Though putting windows on these things is annoying; though i haven't tried XP. Might work.

Anyways, i wouldn't spend more than $300 on any laptop in order to play those games, hell i'd probably go to $100. Used/Refurbished would work just fine.

Probably, there also seem to be models out there for "gaming" although for cloud gaming but those are around 600USD.

Chomebooks are just fine for small things, main problem is the OS itself and the limited amount of RAM, especially models with soldered RAM which is too common nowadays.

I use a refurbished hp workstation 8300 with an i3 with XP to play C&C Generals (game is from 2003) and it plays ok, so yes, that's a good point about refurbished.

You can swap the OS out after you flash the BIOS with something more akin to normal; But all the chipsets won't be available even when you do so. And yeah ram limitations, not the ideal experience. But 2Gb and dualcore 1.6Ghz or higher isn't anything to laugh at either. Back in 2000-2010 there was a push for the $100 laptop per child, and while more rugged exterior the machines were anemic compared to these chromebooks. Plus you can likely get chromebooks cheap right now as the 'lifetime' of them is ending as Google just isn't going to bother with them anymore; Or that's the impression i got.

I'm finding chromebooks are good for note taking, minor web browsing and other activities, including logging into other computers on the network, But i agree, it's not really a 'gaming' machine. But all Dosbox games and probably anything 2000 and before it should run just fine, assuming you can get it to start in WINE, emulator or native linux.

Actually with the qemu package i did get a kernel module added that let the emulator run nearly at full speed. So there's that.

Perhaps the biggest gripe i have with the chromebooks, is they don't standby and return properly, possibly requiring you to open/close the lid a few times, or just force a restart. Oh and getting sound to work is a pain too, unless you just resort to GalliumOS which is tailored to identify chromebook hardware/drivers better.

All of them.

Nearly all of those games have functioning source ports. Age of Empires is the exception, but even those are making steady progress.