[REQUEST] Sony Vaio Picturebook PCG-C1X & C1XS

[Scrambleman]

Good day to everyone!

I have a small challenge I would like to present to you all and I'm willing to donate a few bucks to the community/person who can get it successfully working. Going to give a little background first

I have a few subnotebooks (1998-2000) era that I keep for like small DOS portable game systems (I don't really like to use DOSbox unless I have to), my small collection as follows,

Toshiba Libretto 110Ct (pretty hard to find now days)
Sony Vaio Picturebook PCG-C1X
Sony Vaio Picturebook PCG-C1XS (Just got this in December), super hard to find)

With the Toshiba Libretto, it has a feature in the bios that allows "LCD Screen Expansion" or a stretch screen option, which is super usefully when playing extremely old games, and makes it a joy to play on. However, the Toshiba is the oldest in my Subnotebooks in that era and has limited space due to a hardware limitation (8gb).

With that, I have decided to move to a little more powerful Sony Picturebook. I have gotten everything working exactly the same as the Libretto expect the "LCD Stretch option". This does not exist in the Sony Picturebook Bios's. Without this enabled, all the dos games run in a small square center of the screen (640x480) not stretched, in which I wish it to be.

Reading and looking up other Sony Vaio bios's it seems this is a possibility to enable/have unhidden in the "advance features" section, however I am no expert on how to do this, and since these are an earlier bios (late 90's early 2000's) I wasn't sure its possible.

Good news though, both my C1X and C1XS have flashable bios's as there are downloads on Sony's website to upgrade the C1X bios (In which I have done) and to reflash the C1XS bios if needed. Links are below, Extracting the bios .rom from the setup file cabs, can be done with the uniextract1 program.

Specifications:

Sony Vaio PCG-C1X
Manufacturer: Sony
Bios Type: Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6
Bios revision: R0118T0
CPU: Intel Pentium MMX (266mhz)
Chipset: Intel 430TX
Ram: 128mb SDram

Sony Vaio PCG-C1XS
Manufacturer: Sony
Bios Type: Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6
Bios revision: R0110M0
CPU: Intel Pentium II MMX (400mhz)
Chipset: 440MX
Ram: 128mb SDram

Sony BIOS Links

Sony Vaio PCG-C1X
Sony Vaio PCG-C1XS

My request as follows, Unlock the advance features or whatever is hidden or just the LCD Expansion Screen option for both models ( I want to try the modded bios first on the C1X before I flash the C1XS (hard to find model, don't want to brink it)

Let me know guys, again ill be happy to swing a few bucks someone's way to accomplish this if it works.

Thanks

Dan

[Scrambleman]

Download link with the BIOS.ROM Extracted for the PCG-C1XS
C1XS BIOS

My offer still stands!

[Sml6397]

Hello Scrambleman,

The C1X BIOS image uses a compression algorithm that PhoenixTool does not support and as a result, I am not able to mod it.

PhoenixTool did successfully decompress the C1XS BIOS, but there was not an 'LCD Expansion Option' or anything related to it when I did a plain-text search. I will look more thoroughly tomorrow.


~Steven

[Scrambleman]

Hey Steven,

I appreciate the time are you taking to look at it. I did notice that the C1XS I was able to see in the tool but not the C1X. Good to know that the C1X won't be possible, however I would be curious on what other options the C1XS has.

Thanks

Dan