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| Brandon | Armada 3500I got 3 laptops from Todd a couple months ago, and only one had a working power cord, it was an old Dell but the keyboard was broken and some keys do not work. I got a power cord for a Toshiba Tecra 8000, which was like $10 because the connector is generic. I installed Win98 and have developed Fun500 6 on it, but they keyboard has little annoyances (keys like Tab and shift are the wrong size).
My first laptop was a Compaq Armada E500, so I have a soft spot for Compaq Armadas, the keyboards are some of the best I've used. I went on ebay and got a complete working Armada 3500 unit, minus the hard drive, with an expansion dock. I then took some of the RAM and the harddrive from Todds Armada and it works great, besides one small flaw.
Laptop LCDs don't do well with resolutions that aren't the native one. The LCDs native resolution is 800x600, so when I try to run Fun500 at 640x480, it's scaled and some pixels are stretched. Of course these old Compaqs have no BIOS config utility, so I'm hoping that I can get a floppy to allow me to flash the BIOS and disable the damn scaling!! (Or I'll have to keep the Toshiba) | 2010-03-30 | 11:18 AM |
| Dick | Re:Armada 3500800x600 and 640x480 is the same aspect | 2010-03-30 | 3:00 PM |
| HorvatM | Re:Armada 3500It is, but if you stretch 640*480 to 800*600, each pixel has to be 125% of its original size. This isn't such a problem with newer LCDs that have much larger native resolutions but is kind of tricky on 800*600; you can't divide pixels into smaller units. | 2010-03-30 | 3:29 PM |
| ksr | Re:Armada 3500Do you want to just use the top-left 640x480, leaving the rest of the screen blank? I've never seen a BIOS option to do something like that. | 2010-03-30 | 3:56 PM |
| Brandon | Re:Armada 3500My Toshiba and a Gateway I once had have options to prevent scaling and just display in the center pixels much like a 4:3 app on a 16:9 display. | 2010-03-30 | 4:20 PM |
| Todd | Re:Armada 3500I remember being able to get it scaled down. It's the Fn key followed by one of the function keys like F4 or F5. It's glyph resembles a black screen with a slash between it and a clear screen. | 2010-03-30 | 10:13 PM |
| Brandon | Re:Armada 3500I suppose a smart person would have asked you in the first place :P | 2010-03-31 | 7:03 AM |
| Todd | Re:Armada 3500lol I didn't know until I pressed those keys one day and that's what happened. Just wanted to share my two cents. ;-) | 2010-03-31 | 5:44 PM |
| Brandon | Armada 3500 Working!I read the User's Guide :P It says that Fn+T will toggle screen stretching. So now I have a Compaq Armada 3500, 266Mhz PII,64MB RAM, Win98SE with a CD+Floppy dock as my primary GUI development computer.
(My GUI testing machine is a 66Mhz 486 with FreeDOS) | 2010-03-31 | 6:05 PM |
| Dick | Re:Armada 3500OK hovartm, thanks for clearing that up. I know that CRTs are a not like that.
Anyways, you guys have too many computers :o I have only one computer which I use for everything. I say write your GUI on your main desktop computer and then test it through you collection when it's done. | 2010-03-31 | 10:09 PM |
| Brandon | Re:Armada 3500The problem with developing on my main desktop (My AMD Quad) is that it runs so fast that I can't tell the difference between an efficient routine and a slow one. | 2010-04-01 | 10:00 AM |
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