Gaming on the HP 2133 Mininote

Gaming on the HP 2133 Mininote

• Originally posted in previous other defunct Blog/s: (http://zeroincrement.wordpress.com)
• December 8, 2009 at 3:54 pm

List of Games I’ve Tried on my HP 2133 Mininote:

Age of Empires II & Expansion – Runs great on highest settings even.

Starcraft - Runs fast and great even with expansions of Broodwar and the Gundam pack.

Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos (v.124c) – Runs best at lowest graphic settings. (FYI: Blizzard officially released and provides for free download no-cd patches at their website for this game and Frozen Throne, this goes well for laptops and netbooks like 2133 that doesn’t come with built-in internal CD/DVD ROM drive.) Versions tried running on v.1.02, v.1.24b and v.1.24c, theres a problem with the v.1.24b patch update with not working at “Chapter Six: The Culling” Human Campaign Map, that got fixed with the v.1.24c, other than the version 1.24b, the other 2 versions run fine so far.

Warcraft III: Frozen Throne Expansion (v.1.24c) – Runs exactly the same as Reign of Chaos standalone, running best at the same lowest graphic settings, Blizzard also has updated no-cd patch for Frozen Throne.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 – Runs just as great as Starcraft.

Cossacks: European Wars - Runs as well as this game can be.

Tropico: Mucho Macho Edition – Runs ok, best with low or medium settings.

TextTwist – Runs as good as can be, its a very simple TEXT game with no real need for strong CPU processing power or 3d acceleration anyways.

SimCity 4: Deluxe – Runs well, tried on highest texture detail, visual settings and on 1024×768 resolution, runs very smooth.

Heavy Gear 2 – Runs super good, fast and smooth.

Medieval Lords – Lowest Settings, playable.

Star Wars Republic Commando – Lowest Settings, playable but some parts can get choppy especially when you have to kill alot of flying winged aliens. (Possibly better performance with a 1.6 GHz and ofcourse later models).

Gothic II - Lowest Settings, somewhat playable if you have “great patience”, with lowest settings, but when theres alot of Orcs or enemies it can really slow down almost to a grinding halt, (maybe it has better performance with 1.6GHz) You can run higher options even the “zhighqualityrenderer” but its going to run really slow, but the point is it will run, but it surely doesnt count as one of the games that excel on HP 2133.

Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines – Another game that barely runs just like Gothic II, if not worst, staggeringly slow.

Most any Graphic Novel Games works good, like graphic novel hentai エロゲー/erogē games. Even if these kinds of games minimum system requirements outspecs an HP 2133 with a 1.2GHz processor needing for example a CPU with 1.6Ghz,it will run smooth. Err, tried and tested it on Japanese Eroge games Zyx’s V.Roster game and Err, Bible Black, runs good.

Knights of Honor – Runs well, it can however slowdown abit if you load a saved game which had a huge army and vast lands occupied already, some parts of the game can slow down as well, but still playable. For Example starting a campaign with a 1 province faction, and saving that campaign and loading it when you already have say 10 provinces and heavily garrisoned castles with several marshal knights leading armies.

GuildWars on Windows XP Pro with SP3 – Runs better than on Vista, and is a lesser burden for the cpu and RAM Hogging than GW on Vista which I’ve tried first as my mininote came pre-loaded with Vista, For the curious yes it runs well with all Campaigns – Prophecies, Factions, Nightfall and even Eye of the North. The faster your internet the smoother your gameplay with GW.

GuildWars on Windows Vista – Runs ok, better on windows XP though.

Macross VOXP – Excellent on the HP 2133, however the english language version mod loads quite noticeably slower especially a bit more before mission sorties, however gameplay doesnt seem much affected except on seldom occassions it gets choppy once in awhile not enough to annoy though, but the HDD space occupies more definitely, Vanilla Japanese version runs really well even on just 1.2 GHz HP 2133 model, suggested to keep using the vanilla japanese version without mods to keep the game load speed as fast as possible, use applocale or install Asian Japanese language Support to your windows system if you dont already have it, when using the vanilla Japanese game, to rid yourself of wierd text characters and boxes, on a side note there is also a spanish language mod available, if anyone is interested.

Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green – Runs well, you can run graphics on lowest to have it running smoothest oreven on medium and high settings and it will still be playable, and the settings on shadow detail on low or high doesntmuch matter, I went for the low option, and run it on 1024×768 resolution, audio was running very well on default settings so i didnt bother changing anything there. If you use cheats, all work ok, except using the minigun cheat most times the game crashes on the mininote.

Postal 2 Share The Pain (STP) ***(—Multiplayer Edition Only—)*** Stand Alone – Runs ok, Postal2 STP-MP,

A Once Commercial Game Pack is now released as freeware it can be downloaded here on this link or in others sites as well – [url]http://downloads.guru3d.com/Postal-2-Share-The-Pain-MP-Full-Version-free-download-1935.html[/url]

Postal 2 : Apocalypse Weekend – Runs ok, Single Player Missions expansions of Postal 2, will need either

Postal 2 or Postal 2 Share the Pain Multiplayer Edition to Work. (Watch out for version incompatibility
(USA/EU/etc) with standalones and this pack).

Deus Ex – Runs Excellent, even on the highest Settings and with 1024×768 resolution, though its probably better to stick with an 600×800 resolution with regards to the mininote’s small screen, as the text dialogue is hard to read this way, unless you connect to a bigger external screen.

Delta Force: Land Warrior – Runs well, low or even on all high settings. However to run the game I recieved some errors regarding MMX (on the MMX error it says the VIA chip doesnt support MMX feature – “Error: MMX Compatible Processor not found”, but thats not true because the VIA chip in 2133s supports MMX, SSE, SSE-2 and SSE-3) and a swap file error, i just ignore these messages and keep pressing ok, screen will flicker and such, til I got to the main menu, I start the game, no worries just wait for it to load and it will run fine and stable.

Delta Force: Task Force Dagger - Runs exactly like Land Warrior, same settings, and same errors upon starting the game,just ignore errors and keep pressing ok to get to main menu, and start the game.

Delta Force: Black Hawk Down – Runs very badly even on lowest settings, its very choppy.

Operation FlashPoint: Cold War Crisis - Runs choppy even on low settings in gameplay, though at the menus its deceivingly smooth,though not as bad as Delta Force: Black Hawk Down.

Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear – Runs great, fast and smooth, I’ve ran across just one problem, the mouse pointer disappears only during mission planning menus and team roster configurations menus, which can be a real pain in the ass, all because of the disappearing pointer, I havent found a way to fix it, but theres another way to get by this, go to your windows xp control panel, then go to your mouse properties then check the box that says “Show location of pointer when i press the CTRL Key”, ok so whenever u need to know where the mouse pointer went anytime at all not just in rogue spear, press the CTRL key, uncheck this option when you want it disabled, apply and ok it. Its good that the mouse pointer as your reticle doesnt disappear during the game.

Unreal: Gold Edition – Runs great, if not super smooth and fast, even at the highest Settings, kept it at 1024×768 Resolution.

Icewind Dale II – Runs really good, tried it on low, medium and even high settings, and works well with both 800×600 and 1024×768 resolutions, loading time is fast. If all settings were using the highest, the game very barely gets choppy at times, though not enough to annoy the gamer at all.

Hitman Codename 47 – Runs very well, fast and very smooth gameplay, tried with 1024×768 easy on the eyes, quick load times.

Hitman 2: Silent Assassins – Runs well, though just like playing on a desktop if you try using cheats the game quickly becomes unstable and crashes.

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NOTES:

*(The games are in no praticular order but i do try and group them up sequentially if they are , related or of the same series, ex: Hitman1 and 2)

*(I will update on this post when I can, Since I got a whole bunch of other Games I’d still like to try on the mininote)

*(Do keep in mind that the HP 2133 first of the mininote models was not made as a kick-ass mini gaming laptop though so dont expect it to run something like L4D or so, with a VIA C7-M ULV chip even if it was the 1.6 GHz model)

*However if you like games like L4D you can play with Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green in 2133 instead, with acceptable performance).

*(Also during running of all the games mentioned here, no other un-needed processes and applications were running to lessen the burden on the 2133, in otherwords the games were tested 1 at a time without multi-tasking with other applications for optimal performance of the game/s running on the mininote, this especially means all types of heavy resource eating apps (but not limited to) like firefox, IE, Office Apps, Any Multimedia Authoring Editing Compression & Converter Tools, Limewire/Frostwire or any P2P App, AV,AD,AS,ToR/proxies/Anonymyzers and Firewalls, even any Skype, IM’s or chat client/s, any Java heavy Software, etc-etc. disabled and all background subprocesses of these turned off as well).  For instance I tried, Running just the needed processes and ran Delta Force: LW and it worked really good, smooth performance, then I tried running it while firefox and my firewall and AV were on and it ran quite noticeably choppy.

*(You can make personal copies of your games in .iso’s and can easily just mount the games and install from a virtual drive instead, with applications like for example: MagicISO(commercial non-freeware) and its MagicDisc(freeware) Virtual Drive offered separately as freeware, or other commercial software like UltraISO, PowerISO, Winmount, Alcohol 120%, DaemonTools and such kinds of apps), instead of running it with an external CD/DVD ROM, if ur not plugged and the ROM draws power from your 2133, the stock battery definitely wont last long, power failures will not only be annoying for losing game data, your FileSystem is at risk of corruption as well, dont rely on chkdsk 100% to fix it whenever it happens.

*Any Games that came with older version of DirectX, Dont bother installing it, if you have a DirectX thats more up to date, keep your latest DirectX, in the case of windows xp, the official latest is DirectX 9, and thats what I use in my winxp 2133 as well.

*Slowest and lowest Performers I’ve tried so far, are in order of the 5th being the worst:

1.) Star Wars Republic Commando

2.) Operation FlashPoint: Cold War Crisis.

3.) Delta Force: Black Hawk Down

4.) Gothic II

5.) Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines.

Best to avoid numbers (2), (3), (4) & (5).

*I just recently discovered a list of games at mininoteuser.com wiki at this link – [url]http://wiki.mininoteuser.com/howto:gamesonthemini[/url], they listed Gothic II running beautifully, now I can say that it does run and look good in my HP 2133 but its runs very slow and choppy, the graphics do render well at the 2133 but the performance is horrible, However I think they meant the ingame gameplay itself runs great which in my experience is the total opposite. Though they dont mention any other details of the mininote they used if it was a 1.0/1.2/1.6 GHz,

or if the cited games were used by one same constant 2133 model or how much RAM or what model mininote they used, and less details/settings much about anything else for Gothic II or any other games they listed in that link, its likely they ran a later mininote model to run better performance with Gothic II.

*A note on both Delta Force Games (LW & TFD) if you experience problems with installing the Delta Force Games mentioned above, on the mininote, try right-clicking on the Setup.exe (which is a 16 bit installer, well atleast for DF:Land Warrior as i remember it) icon in the Delta force installation CD, click properties, check the compatibility run box and pick windows 95 or 98/Me, apply and then ok it, run the setup again. *** Another way is to copy all files of the entire Game from the CD to your 2133, and run the main DF executable file, but that would occupy a bigger amount of HDD space.

*I originally posted this in the hpminiguide.com forums(in this links Thread : http://www.hpminiguide.com/forum/general-discussion/510-games-excel-hp-2133-a.html) but had a bad time fixing editing and updating the information, I since deleted the original post, rife with errors and with less games and details, and moved it here, well it be easier for me to keep logging, updating and maintaining it here instead too.

** The “SWAT 4” pc game, I couldnt get it to run. Even if the system requirements just about fits, being – 1.2 GHz processor, 128 MB RAM, 32 MB video card, 2 GB free hard drive, probably work for the 1.6GHz 2133 models.

** All Games I tried on my HP 2133 myself with specs 1.2GHz, 2GB RAM (DDR2 333MHz) and Microsoft Windows XP Professional with SP3 and ofcourse the corresponding mininote WIN-XP drivers. Used an External DVD-ROM for installing from Game CDs, and on occasion to make .iso copies of my game CDs for virtual drive mounting instead. The specific model of my mininote is the HP 2133 FH414PA, heres the link to its official page in HP website:HP 2133 FH414PA