hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2187.txt

Episode: 2187
Title: HPR2187: The Toshiba Libretto 100ct
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2187/hpr2187.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 15:29:04

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Hello world, it's Mirror Shades here again, a very tired Mirror Shades, but here's
just the same, so today I just want to talk about something a little bit different than what I normally talk about.
Recently I got into retro gaming, but probably for different reasons and I think everybody gets into whatever it is they get into for whatever their reasons are, but having grown up in the golden age of video games,
and I was never able to play PC games for most of that period. I didn't have a my first new computer I got in 98, so I grew up in the 80s and early 90s, so it was kind of kind of missed out on all that, so I'm going back now and I'm buying a lot of these old late dolls, early windows games.
And I bought something a little piece of hardware I want to talk about today. It's a Toshiba libretto 100CT and it's a fantastic little device for that specific purpose.
It doesn't have 3DS celebration, but there's a few things I want to talk about this machine.
For one thing, it's incredibly small, like I did not know that we could produce something this small back in 98.
It's actually got a Pentium 1, I'll talk about the hardware a little bit first, here let me get it.
I'll make myself comfortable here. So the hardware, this came out in 1998, so in that generation, you know, laptops usually lag behind a little bit from desktops and my desktop that I got that year was a Pentium 2.
This is a Pentium 1, 166 megahertz. It came stock with 32 megs RAM and I bought this used and the guy I got it from took really good care of it.
And at some point, he added, he topped it off at 64 megs, it's the most this machine can take.
And he actually still had the little receipt from many years ago when he took it in some place and had it professionally done.
And all the documentation, the papers, the instructions that came with it, it was great.
But what's amazing about it is closed, it's about the size of a VHS tape.
And most of the machines that are this ultra mobile, that fit that ultra mobile device profile from that era are usually palm tops and like HP Jornada, Palm Pilot stuff.
And most of these things ran Windows CE, so this thing actually ran a full version of Windows.
You can run Linux on it, it is, and don't expect any high end computing to be done. I mean, it's 166 megahertz with 64 megs of RAM.
The hard drive that came with it was a two gigs, I believe, and it was really slow.
You can put just about any size IDE drive in this thing, but it's a little bit of a pain because if you decide to get one of these, I'm just going to tell you now, so you'll know what you're getting into.
So you have to partition the drive kind of weird. If it's bigger than eight gigs, the BIOS in this thing is really weird.
It raw writes hibernation data to a specific area of the hard drive that's like between the eight and nine gig mark.
And most people online have said if they partition around that, they're fine and how many trouble.
If you want to get one big partition out of it, you're going to run into issues because the first time the BIOS decides to write raw write data to it, it's going to destroy the file system, obviously.
So most people are doing or buying those little IDE, they're the size of a laptop, like a two and a half inch laptop drive, but they have a CF card.
It's like a CF card adapter and just using that in place of a hard drive because you can get a eight gig CF card now.
So that saves you from having to do the multiple partitions and stuff.
This is the thing that's really weird. If it's eight gigs or smaller, you won't have an issue.
I do not know why that is. It doesn't make sense to me.
I don't know. Sorry, my phone's buzzing.
That's a strange little quirk of the BIOS. Don't know why that is. Couldn't tell you.
When I got mine, it came with the docking station and a few other peripheral devices. The device itself really doesn't have a lot in the way of inputs.
There is a single PCMCI slot on the side and then on the bottom there is a highway port for the docking station.
The docking station has what you would expect. It's got a parallel port, a serial port. I think it's actually got one USB port and a couple of PCMCI slots.
It did come with a PCMCI CD-ROM drive and a floppy drive and a USB adapter for the slot. It's a USB card.
It will only boot from floppy. This is the part of the discussion that's weird.
In order to get this thing to work, I have not used Windows 98 in years and years.
I know we talk mostly about Linux and BSD, but I had grown blissfully unaware of all the headaches that we used to endure in the Windows world back in the day.
Obviously, you can't boot from a CD-ROM, trying to boot from a CD on this thing was kind of a pain.
The easiest thing to do, once I got the hard drive partitioned, the way I wanted it, I had to actually, if you're in the younger crowd and you ever find yourself doing this because you're trying to do retro gaming or something.
Because I've read a lot of people using Windows 98 second edition because it's a later version of the 9x line so you can still reboot an MS-DOS mode.
But there is what I'm trying to say.
If you buy one of these devices and you try to get Windows 98 second edition on here, the easiest thing to do is to take the hard drive, once you have it partitioned, the way you want it.
And the way I did it was I made a gig partition and then I left a space of just a gig. I don't think you actually have to make it that big, but I used a 60 gig drive so it didn't matter.
I didn't care to lose a gig.
And then just partition the rest of it as a separate, you know, fat 32 partition and let Windows pick it up.
However, I had to copy. There is a folder on the Windows CD that you can just, it's full of cab files and it has the setup.exe file.
And if you just copy that to the hard drive, you can boot from a floppy and just run setup from that and it'll install Windows just like you booted off the CD.
The other neat thing that you can do, if you do it that way, Windows 98, 95, 98, 98 SD, maybe even Millennium Edition did it too. I don't know, I never really used any.
But they were really bad about any time you attached a new piece of hardware, it would just complain it wanted drivers and it never had those drivers.
And even if you install the drivers at the time it wants you to install, it would want you to insert the Windows CD and it would copy a bunch of crap off of there.
If you leave that folder on your hard drive, you never have to reinsert the disk for that.
Another weird issue you're going to run to because of the whole driver thing.
Because we're spoiled, we forget how spoiled we are with USB, just plugging it in and it works.
That doesn't work on 98 SD, but there are USB match storage drivers for 98 SD that you can install.
And that will take care of that problem so you can copy stuff off of your, you know, your thumb drive or whatever external hard drive.
The device itself is actually not always small, but the LCD, this is another kind of a weird thing.
I don't see too many devices from 98, from that year that are widescreen and this is widescreen that really shocked me.
Most laptops you get from the late 90s, they're all full screen.
I'm not exactly sure when they started really making laptops with widescreen, like when they made that the standard, but that was a surprise to me.
There's actually several models of a libretto.
I think the one most people are after is the 110 CT, you know, the 100 CT, you can, it's got a 166 megahertz pinion processor.
It is overclockable. I have not overclocked mine. I don't really have a need to for the stuff that I'm doing with it, but you can overclock it.
I think it goes 166, 233, and then 266.
And it's my understanding that 266 is highly unstable, but if you overclock it to 233, it's a rock.
In fact, I'm pretty sure that's all they did with the 110 when they released it, that in head more RAM, but I think they just overclocked the pinion to 233 and left it.
It is solid as a rock.
Like I said, I haven't done it, but everything I've read says, you know, it runs really stable. I have no reason to doubt that, but your mileage may vary.
Take note, though, overclocking this isn't a simple thing of just, you know, getting in the BIOS and overclocking it.
It does require you to tear down the device, and you actually have to solder two points on the board to get that overclock.
Another thing, and this is something I've run into.
And unfortunately, this may be just something I have to live with.
The LCD on mine has developed a red stripe.
It's one pixel wide on the left-hand side of the screen.
And if you've ever experienced this phenomenon, you know, if you push on the screen, but if you'd like to adjust the screen and you put a little bit of pressure on it, the red stripe will go away.
And then when you let go, of course it comes back.
I've done some reading on this, some say, you know, this, some of the contacts for the ribbon cable could be corroded.
I actually took the bezel off and checked. Everything looks really tight in there. Nothing looks loose. Nothing looks really corroded.
I didn't remove the ribbon cable, though, because sometimes on an older machine like this that's never had the ribbon cable removed when you start removing it, it gets a little looser.
But this led me to realize that if the problem is in the LCD, and it's not something I can easily resolve, which it very well could be,
there's really no recourse to fixing that sort of finding another libretto with a good screen, which is practically impossible.
Well, it's not impossible, but you're going to be paying for that.
I don't think the, I'm pretty sure they don't manufacture that LCD anymore.
I don't know. I guess that's just one of the hazards of getting into retro, not just retro gaming, but retro hardware in general.
I kind of like old computers, and having some old video games to run on, gives it kind of a purpose.
I know there's things like DOS box, and you know, crap, one of them I think of, you know, virtual machines, whatever, virtual box, and VMware.
But it's kind of, it takes a little bit of doing to get some of those things to work.
If you're, if you have like an actual legitimate CD of a game, or even maybe floppies, those solutions aren't always the easiest thing to do.
It's actually sometimes easier just to pop it in an old computer and install it.
Unfortunately, you know, some of that hardware is starting to get hard to come by.
I don't know. If anybody out there has suggestions, feel free to comment.
I would love to know more about, or have more ideas about what to do about the LCD, but I don't, I don't think there's much I can do.
I just enjoy it while I last, I guess. I actually have one of the newer libretto's too, and it's a, it's a neat little computer.
It's a, it's almost the same size. It's docking station is a little bit nicer, and it actually has a DVD ROM built into the docking station.
I don't remember what the model, I think it's a U100. It's the one that has the white and brush silver kind of look on the lid.
But it's, they've got seven inch LCDs. I've actually considered maybe figuring out a way to pull a different LCD from something and trying to, you know, some hardware hacking to get that to work on the older libretto if, you know, the LCD ever does in it.
Because, you know, you can attach an external monitor to that, but it sort of defeats the purpose. The point of it is, is that it is so small, that, you know, that's what's cool about it.
But the newer one has, geez, I can't remember the specs on that. I think it's a gigahertz processor and a giga RAM, or maybe it's 1.2 gigahertz, I don't know.
But I think it does have, it does have some three acceleration on that one. It can do some 3D.
It's kind of nice between the two devices. You can kind of run the gamut of PC gaming from the, you know, the DOS days of, I would say, at least mid to late 80s.
Maybe even some of the early 80s stuff. I don't know, I'm not tested some of that really old stuff, but all the way up to, well, you can go all the way.
I'm going to say, probably to mid to late 90s with a caveat on the, on the old libretto because they were still making DOS games into the later 90s.
A lot of people don't know that, but they were mostly because they wanted to sell as many games as possible, and a lot of people still had old computers, so they still produced DOS based games.
And they still produced games that weren't necessarily like hardcore 3D. I mean, that was coming into its own, making a mistake, but they were still making regular games in that time period too.
So some of that stuff might actually run on the older libretto, but the newer ones kind of neat. It's kind of interesting. I think it's got most of the stuff you would expect. It's kind of, it would kind of put you in mind of, I don't know, the early netbooks.
I mean, that's basically what it is.
I think the older ones actually a little bit more amazing just because of its age and the fact that it is so small, but yeah, overcoming some of the problems of getting an old version of windows on there and dealing with windows.
I mean, trying to track down windows 98 drivers, first of all, is a complete pain and then trying to having to partition the thing weird and it's a lot to overcome and then dealing with windows 98's quirks anyway, because, you know, if you haven't ever known the joy of having to use windows 98 second edition or even regular 98 for your everyday operating system.
I mean, you would, some days you would just sit down at your computer and it would just blue screen for no reason. Sometimes it would refuse to boot for no reason.
I haven't, you know, honestly, it hasn't been that bad on this libretto, but I will say I don't use it every day.
I have a regular machine, I have a regular desktop and a regular laptop that I use, but it's a, for its purpose, it does the job very nicely.
I may, as right now the second I may, I don't know, see if I can get some pictures and post in the show notes of this thing.
If you can get one, you know, eBay, you're going to, you're going to pay eBay prices about most people have said and they're right.
I've seen them on eBay really expensive, but sometimes you come across one of these guys at a garage sale or a flea market or something, a goodwill store, occasionally you'll come across one and then want like 30 bucks for it and it's definitely, if you can get one cheap, get it, it's a lot of fun.
They're actually, I got to say, the, the two that I have, the build quality is, is really nice.
It, even the old one, I mean, considering its vintage, it, everything still works on it.
There's no major scuffs or cracks or, and actually the battery still holds a bit of a charge.
I think you can run it for about two hours on roughly, maybe a little less than two hours, spending on what you're doing on the original battery.
I don't know, it's a, it's a fun device.
I don't have a lot of people who are around me who are into this sort of thing.
If anybody, again, if anybody out there has any ideas about the LCD, I would appreciate any information that you can give me, the device itself, if you can find one cheap, pick it up, what else?
Actually, you know, I have, I've had a lot of luck with some of these old PC games.
I've been buying, I wouldn't say I'm a collector, but I have been kind of grown a collection without really meaning to.
They're not, PC games, the great thing about buying them, like from that era, you know, that was in the days before they really had copy protection on most of them.
And there's, there's really for whatever reason, there's not a lot of resale value on PC games like console games.
So you can get them kind of cheap if you look around.
And well, I know there's also people are going to say abandon where, jump on the abandon where side and start downloading.
I realized they're there. It, it depends on the game. Honestly, some games, it depends on how much work it's going to take me to, to get that up and running.
Because I've seen some games that, especially with early CD games, you run into this a lot where they've had to been patched because they required the CD to be in the drive.
And sometimes the, the music, there's some games out there that you will run into that had an original, their original release was on floppy.
And so their original soundtrack was something like MIDI music.
And they would re-release it on CD and it would most of the time be the exact same game.
Sometimes they would do the remastered ones, but sometimes they would just release the exact same game with an enhanced soundtrack on CD.
And then they would have the music would sound and sometimes it would also include like voice acting where they couldn't do that with the floppies.
And, and if you go to a, like in a band and where side and you try to get those, unless they're giving you an actual ISO of the disc, a lot of times they've tried to rip all that stuff and package it and you get, you'll get like MP3s of the original CD music and a Q sheet or something.
And then you have to do a bunch of weird stuff to get that to work and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.
Sometimes the sound works right, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the game just doesn't run right.
And I mean honestly, for games of this vintage, most of the time it costs very, very little to buy them.
It's almost worth it to me to pay the few dollars just to not have the headache.
But yeah, I don't know where I'm going with this now. I've just been rambling for half an hour.
There are, like I said, there are things like DOS box and virtual box and you can set up a lot of this on a modern computer.
But there's something special about an old box. You can go on YouTube and there are quite a few videos of people who have retro hardware and they're setting it back up.
It's kind of cool to watch that stuff or see them run some of these old DOS games on, on vintage hardware.
And I know that's the kind of thing we don't really talk about, much on hacker public radio, but it's just something I've recently gotten into.
If anybody else out there is into this, I'd like that'd be great to hear from you too.
Comments are welcome. If you haven't submitted an episode this year, you might want to consider doing that and make your own episode.
I actually have a, it's grown into kind of a crap ton of old games.
If you have a big collection, maybe you want to talk about some of them.
It would be great to hear about that stuff. Any special, I know it's Windows, but Windows 98 SE, like if you go out and you try to look for,
if you go out and you look for things like, say, drivers or just an old Windows 98 theme, just because Windows 98's really fugly, it's hard to find that stuff.
But what's even harder to find sometimes is just information about it.
I mean stuff that we took for granted back in 98 because it was all over the internet. Anything you needed to know about it, you could look it up and all that stuff's gone.
I remember back in the day, I had all kinds of stuff, had these registry hacks and I had all kinds of really cool customizations.
I did to it just to make it more fun and I've totally forgotten all those.
And I don't know where my notes ever went and most of those websites are gone because, you know, who the hell runs Windows 98 anymore.
And that kind of stuff would be kind of cool. If anybody out there has any of that stuff, you know, I would like to hear about it.
I don't know if there's big enough audience to hear about it, but some of that stuff would be handy to me and anyone else interested in retro hardware.
As I said before, you can run Linux on, I'm sure either one of them, I know for a fact that you can run it on the older libretto.
But again, you're going to be running something like damn small Linux or maybe puppy Linux on this thing.
And it's probably going to be slow, but I will say that it's a lot snappier than you would think it is.
Like I was really shocked. There is, I don't know what is it, in the BIOS, there's like right through caching for the CPU.
I'll be honest with you. I've run into like one or two games that you have to kind of turn that off or they don't run.
But beyond that, I leave it turned on. It makes a huge, huge difference. The system boots faster. It does seem a lot snappier.
It's almost like a different system if you turn that off.
So that's about it for me. If you have any information, you'd like to share on any of the topics, retro gaming, retro hardware, old Windows 98 junk.
It'd be great to hear from you post a comment. Again, if you have it done a show this year, you should think about submitting one.
And that's about it for me. And I'll listen to you guys later.
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