First post, by EriolGaurhoth
A while back, there have been a number of posts about a great tool for getting full screen (that is a "stretched" 4:3 aspect ratio on 320x200 DOS games) on laptops with a C&T 65550 & 65554 video chip called "VEXP", here on archive.org:
https://archive.org/details/vexp13
This is targeted at a bunch of Pentium I era laptops with a chip that doesn't really do 3D acceleration in Windows. Great laptops, to be sure, but not particularly versatile for gaming beyond DOS. A few in the Toshiba Tecra series are listed and were the primary target for the utility: the Tecra 720, 730, 740, and 500.
I happen to have a Tecra 780CDM. It's a newer Pentium II model with a 4MB ViRGE MX, quite a bit better for early D3D accelerated gaming in Windows 9x. It's a great laptop with excellent OPL3 sound. In spite of the excellent DOS compatibility in terms of sound, it is AWFUL visually for playing DOS games, as it has no real way to stretch them to use a standard 4:3 aspect ratio, to my knowledge. All DOS games running in standard 320x200 appear "widescreen" with black bars at the top and bottom. The laptop bios has a "scaling" mode, but it only zooms in the widescreen DOS game, doesn't stretch it to fill the entire screen.
I was wondering, does anyone know of a fix for this? A universal fix, a fix specific to the S3 chip, a bios hack that allows "stretch" mode to fill the entire screen and not just zoom the image? This has the potential to be a really awesome DOS gaming powerhouse if not for that glaring issue. Other, even more powerful laptops, like the wonderful Gateway 9100 with built-in wavetable also seemingly have this issue related to the S3 chip not having a native "fill" mode for stretching the image to fill the entire screen.