using a laptop for a bar arcade. need help with frontend and sound drivers etc.

[hobsonschoice]

Hi Guys,
i've been lurking around this forum for a couple of weeks now in reparation of my first Bar Arcade Project and would like to get involved.
I  usuall y repair laptops as a hobby and have dozens of motherboards and screens around and would like to make use of them somehow.
The plan is to use an old Dell laptop C500 and also to use the lcd screen instead of a monitor. this should make the whole thing smaller and more compact not to mention very light. this will be my prototype before moving on to a higher spec laptop with Glossy screen.

The issues i am trying to resolve at present are which frontend to use, I have tried a few so far and really like the MalaFE setup.
Now, the questions i have are as follows.

If i load tinyxp on the laptop will i be able to configure it to load directly into the mala?
I have the laptop setup with win98se at present and Mala in the autostart menu. This works ok but it loads:
dell bios loading screen
windows 98 logo
desktop and toolbar
then the mala window in the middle of the page
then it loads mala game menu full screen.
Although this works i would like to hide the fact that windows is running.
I would like to see just the dell bios load and then nothing except Mala fullscreen? Is this possible with tinyxp?


Second question is a bit more technical.
I have tried a couple of DOS only frontends but this does not load the laptop sound drivers as all the dos cd's around are assuming i am using a standard PC with monitor and so only seems to have soundcard drivers for all the basic PC cards not drivers for realtek, Crystal audio, neomagic and the like.
If i was in win98 i assume i could somehow edit the autoexec.bat or config.sys to load these but on XP there is no auto.exe or config so how on earth do i install these sound drivers in DOS? I would probably have the same problem with the display drivers as well i assume.

any advice would be really appreciated,
 please?
Dave

[Space Fractal]

For the dos, sound/video drivers can only used for XP and not for DOS. This because XP only emulate dos and Xp do not allow full acess to the system.

In the fact DOSBOX is much better to emulate older games than Windows XP indbuldt DOS emulator can.

Instead you need go for Windows 98 or FreeDOS or such that, or just a old MS DOS. WindowsXP is simply not designed to run DOS applications.

[hobsonschoice]

Ok,
so that means i can't run dos on my laptop and expect to get the normals audio /video drivers installed because they are xp dependent.

Ok, so that leaves me with my other question, TinyXP, can anyone point to a guide on how to get Mala to load immediately from start up and bypass all the windows desktop views , toolbars etc.

Is it some sort of wrapper i need?
thanks