Hey everyone,

I've read the forums here for years and this is my first post. I figure this is the best place to seek help for this scenario.

I just finished a restoration of an NEC Versa 4000C - a chunky but charming multimedia notebook from 1995.

However, I noticed a strange artifact when running anything in DOS: anything running at 320x200 is stretched vertically so there's odd banding in the image. Most of the time it just results in slightly taller text but anything with dithering ends up looking pretty terrible. There are no options in NEC's BIOS related to the video output. Here's an example. Note the break in the dithered pattern on the scroll bar.

Now, I've looked around and found that other laptops of the same vintage (notably the Toshiba Satellite Pro 400cdt) don't exhibit this issue in graphics mode. Frustratingly, Toshiba's BIOS also includes an option to disable that vertical stretch in text mode, too.

Both machines share a Chips & Technologies 65545 1MB chip for graphics. On the 4000C I can see the briefest flash of a message related to that before the BIOS posts indicating "BIOS 1.00.36" and "Version 204".

Is there some third party utility I can use to disable this vertical stretch, or am I out of luck on this machine? On slightly newer SVGA notebooks (with the C&T 65550/65554 series) someone wrote a utility to enable and disable aspect stretch, but that doesn't work on my older model.