Netbook and retro/emulated gaming?

Good to see the forum is still flourishing. And the guru's are still around.

Didn't know which section this best belongs in, as it's not a single emulator specific.

Anyway, I fancy getting a netbook while away from home. As I'm not sold on the small screens I'm looking at 11"+ models. Largest I've seen is 11.6"

I will replace the HD with a SSD I have spare, that should breath some life into the unit, but I'm worried the CPU will limit any emulation.

One unit that has caught my eye at present is a Packard Bell dot m/a. This uses a single core AMD L110 at 1.2GHz. Also considering the Intel Atom netbooks too, e.g. Z520 single core at 1.2GHz

Has anyone any experience on this topic, and if this would be sufficient for WinUAE play and recording, old DOSBox games play and recording, e.g. first 2 Eye Beholders and similar, and old MAME titles? I suspect MAME is out of the question altogether.

If you got a netbook with a dual core atom cpu and at least 1 GB of ram you can easily run any old DOS games using DOSBox and I'm sure more of the older (non 3D) games that MAME supports will also run perfectly.

You could also set the system up to dual boot into XP and Linux so you have the compatibility from XP with PC emulators and other software and games you wish to run, but also having Linux would allow for a more lightweight OS to allow more resources over for emulation. You can run UAE and many others such as DOSBox and ScummVM in Linux.

As for WinUAE, I'm not sure about the recent versions as they have become quite reliant on faster PCs with more ram and better DirectX support. However any version before 1.3 should run fine on slower systems. Just try a few versions out on the final system you get until you find one that works well. The latest might very well function OK.

So probably safer to increase price bracket and enter budget laptop section.

Personally I would say yes. You are better off paying a bit more and getting a notebook/laptop with an Intel core2duo processor rather than an Atom CPU.

And make sure you get at least 2GB of ram and a graphics card that isn't sharing system ram if possible to keep things running smoothly.

You can easily get such a spec for around the £300 mark, or refurbished for less.

That's exactly what I did recently, I wanted to get a netbook with an atom, but decided to get a "real" laptop instead.