I'm going to uni this October and will soon be buying a laptop. I don't have a huge budget, probably £400, £450 at a push. I already have a pretty good desktop PC so even if I had the money, getting gaming laptop would be mostly pointless.

I'm just wondering, could any modern laptop play the classic games in here? I mean, if I get something with an integrated GPU, what year of games is that likely to be okay with?

That totally depends on the games and how demanding their engines are. I have a ~ £350 HP laptop, Intel Core i3-4030U, 4Gb RAM, Win 8.1, Intel HD graphics 4400. As far as AAA games go, it runs Bioshock, Assassin's Creed (both 2007) and Bully (2006/2008), but that does not automatically mean it will run everything up to 2007 and nothing newer. Generally, I tend to avoid 3D games though, even older ones (and also badly optimized indie games running on 3D engines), because the laptop quickly gets hot when I run them. But I can play recent indie games like Steamworld Heist or Shadowrun Hongkong without problems. So it's really more about the type of games you're planning to play with it.

One advice I can give you, if you care about this like I do and you want to play older games or low resolution indie games, make sure your laptop is capable and set up to display correct aspect ratio instead of stretching the image, because when I was looking for my laptop, I learned from experience that it's not a given. It took a while to find one that actually works for old games in this regard, apparantly many don't care about providing correct aspect ratio for 4:3 games and that would have ruined oldschool gaming for me. It's a bit tricky to find out though; I only found mine because a nice saleswoman allowed me to check in the store; with the others I could only try at home after buying and had to return them afterwards (they had other problems too, but this was one important aspect to me).

With that budget you most likely won't have any problems running older games.

Doesn't this depend only on the GPU and its drivers? i haven't used recent ATI/AMD GPUs, but I've been able to find that setting at least on Intel HD and Nvidia Geforce drivers. Just make sure you have the latest drivers, I recall at first it wasn't available on the Intel drivers, but with newer drivers it was.

Also, quite often the option (for keeping aspect ratio) becomes available in the driver settings ONLY if you using a 4:3 resolution. So before trying to find that setting, set your Windows desktop resolution to some 4:3 resolution, like 1024x768. Then afterwards when you have enabled the aspect ratio setting, you can switch back to your laptop's native (16:9) resolution.

Wadjet eye games use AGS to make the games and these run on almost anything, thats why i own all the games, so my old dinosaur pc can play games.


Lost Chronicles of Zerzura is a older game (point and click) created by the devs woho made black mirror 2 and 3 ( which i also own 1,2 and 3)
most of my games are point and click, a few turnbased classics like fallout classics, jagged alliance classics, some rts like commando classic, baldurs gates classic, all claiisic versions ( no 3d or other fpp versions)
Anyway , depending on what games you want to play you an average pc could run lots of games if you dont need to run the latest games ( fpp/shooters/ and more console conversions ).

Could be, but the laptops came with pre-installed drivers and set ups and simply updating them didn't work. And I tried setting the desktop to different resolutions first like you suggest, to no avail. Some people here on the forums recommended a complete re-install of the system or something. In any case, I'm not saying it would have been impossible, but it was a real pain to try and get it to work and I didn't feel like investing that much energy into it. With the laptop I have now, the default set up was already working out of the box like I'm used to on the desktop PC, simple and easy to use.

Thanks for the answers. I'm sure any computer could run ScummVM and Dosbox stuff, it's when you start to get into old but still somewhat more advanced games like NWN. I remember NWN2 being a bit of a bastard to run even on my last PC (or maybe the one before that, eitherway it was in a time when it should have ran easily).

NWN runs on my laptop but I find it more fun to play on the desktop PC (laptop only allows for a lower resolution -> bigger GUI windows taking up screen space; and I only use touchpad or gamepad on my laptop, no mouse). There may be occasional hickups but that's more due to how NWN is programmed vs. the year of its release. I don't think I tried NWN2 on the laptop, since it's horribly optimized and runs subpar on the desktop already (and shouldn't be compared to anything else, the game is notorious for how bad it runs even on high end PCs). I've played Evil Islands (2000) on the laptop and it worked fine. Planescape Torment and the likes (classic versions) work perfectly, too, as do newer indie games like Shadowrun Dragonfall or Banner Saga.

Btw, I found that some DOSBOX stuff can run worse on weaker PCs than newer games, because it's not DOS but an emulator with higher requirements, or because the individual DOSBOX settings aren't perfect for a more modern but less powerful computer. I'm mostly talking about my old netbook here though. The laptop should be powerful enough to run all DOSBOX games.

Maybe these ones will help on giving you some ideas:

6 Laptops for Back to School!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MIvTf17iqM
Best Laptop for Back to School - 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEFIF8dX3yU
Top 10 - The Best Thin and Light Laptops! (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aSht_ssls
A GOOD $600 Gaming Laptop!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=al_5-BDDFPs

Also, even though they're over your budget, you can also take a look at the Xiaomi Air or the Huawei MateBook X, as they seem to be nice and relatively cheap ultrabooks

Did it seem to be independent of the GPU, ie. on two different laptops with the same GPU, one could retain the aspect ratio while another could not? Or did the problems seem to occur on certain GPUs, or certain manufacturer's GPUs (e.g. Intel Graphics, or NVidia)?

How old we talkin?

I'd be happy with the early 2000s, though more recent would be a bonus.

Okay, I'll just take my suggestion for a 486 laptop and leave it over here then.

I got my laptop last year for £250 (admittedly it seems to have been a bit of a bargain as I couldn't get anything as good for less than £350 when I was shopping for my partner recently) and it plays most stuff, even up to fairly modern games.

For £450 I'm sure you'll be able to get a laptop that will play most games (on lower graphics settings at least).

I can definitely run NWN (my old laptop could, and this one is far better) and though I've never tried NWN 2 I doubt it would be a problem unless there is something particularly unusual about it.

Are there any other specific games or game types you would be interested in playing on it?

It'd be mainly RPGs or turn-based stuff, I'd say. Though it would be pretty amazing to play Dark Souls on there for when I'm travelling by train. I was under the impression that intergrated cards were complete crap and only good for basically outputting an image to the screen.