Simulating a lower resolution on the OLPC XO Laptop

[Strider]

Hi,
I have a XO Laptop which is a nice machine machine with a high res display
of 1200x900 pixels. The problem with this is that the laptop isn't powerful
enugh to handle fullscreen applications at this resolution. If only the
display could switch to a lower resolution things would be much better but
it seems that this laptop only supports a single resolution.

So I was wondering if it would be possible of simulating lower res at a low
level, that is the xf86-video-geode driver.
I'm not an expert in video drivers but i imagine that there are functions to
request a pixel to be drawn on screen based on what's in the video ram.
Now let's say that it's not one pixel but two that we put on screen, and
that we draw each lines two times. That would result in a 600x450
resolution.
If we do the same thing but repating the operations three times , we would
have a 400x300 resolution.
Some emulators have a scale option to do such a thing and manage it quite
well, but if we had such an option in the video driver, the result would be
even faster !

So what do you think about this? Is it possible ?

Regards, Mathieu
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