[Fractint] Screen mode (widescreen) for a Packard-Bell laptop?

I have a PB laptop bought back in January, and want to be able to run DOS Fractint 20 in its native res of 1280x800(x2^32, although of course for Fractint purposes I'd like a colour depth of 256). I've tried to assign this mode to the F2 key with a fast hack of FRACTINT.CFG, but having done almost no machine-code programming on the PC I don't know what the register values should be, so I just left the existing ones. The resulting mode gives a display of sorts, but in graphics mode it's garbled. Does anyone have any idea what I should type? I don't know what chipset the onboard display adapter is, nor how to find out... (Would setting it as a VESA mode instead work? How do I do that?)