Old Toshiba laptop doesn't stretch 640x480 game into full screen

yes, 640x480 in windows is the lowest res and it doesn't scale

 

Unfortunately, most older laptops have scaling issues due to the technology involved. Sadly, the only solution is to run it on an external monitor that can handle scaling of 640x480 to full resolution, as I can't think of an application that will do what you're trying to do (even DOSbox bends to the will of Warcraft's 640x480 hard-coded resolution IIRC).

 

2MB of video RAM is fine for DOS and Win9X; it's only being used as a small framebuffer. That's enough memory to have 2 800x600x16 bit pages. It's not like DOS software makes use of any hardware acceleration.

What you guys aren't seeing is that it isn't the video card. It's the screen. The screen is digital and thus FIXED to 800x600, it doesn't support any other resolutions, it's not an analog CRT. If the video card did not already have the special modes to specifically drive the 800x600 screen, any resolution BUT 800x600 would be fixed to the upper left corner.

Video cards never scale video, modern 3D cards only ASSIST an API such as DirectX. Maybe (not likely) a card can assist by taking a 320x200 texture and scaling it full-screen, but that's still not the same thing. Old games write directly to the framebuffer, no videocard will scale the framebuffer up to another resolution*. When you change the video resolution on any PC, the video card doesn't scale anything, it changes both the pixel clock and frame timing parameters (sync) and framebuffer parameters. It's up to software to render the image at the new resolution to the framebuffer.

Also technically analog screens don't "scale" a small image to a large screen, the pixels aren't fixed so a multi-sync monitor will change the raster thickness based on the timing.


*well, technically this video card does, but only because it's specifically made for 800x600 laptops