Amazingly (maybe due to lack of 3d poly's) Outcast seems to work on my netbook (N450, 1GB HP Mini).
Only problem is it stretches to full widescreen rather than appears framed in black borders.
So the opposite problem of on my proper PC!
Anyone else tried it on a netbook and got any clue how to get it going in 4:3 aspect ratio?
Thanks!

The 640x480 patch isn't going to fix his problem. Nothing you can do on the game side will correct the stretching on a widescreen display. You need to set the display to use aspect-scaling. On a normal desktop with an ATI or nVidia video card, this is just an option in the driver settings. However, I don't know if such a thing is possible with whatever video chipset a netbook would have.
Just go into your display control panel - if there even is one - and see if there's an option that says aspect-correct scaling. If you can't setup your display to do aspect scaling, you're out of luck.

You know, contrary to vocal (rather than popular) opinion, netbooks are fully functional computers. I'm not quite sure why some people feel the need to paint these mini-laptops as somehow crippled and useful only for surfing the internet and writing one or two emails. Maybe it's because I started off on a Commodore 64 and I thought a 486 laptop running Windows 3.11 (of all things) was the bees' knees, but I don't think a 1.6 GHz processor and a GB of RAM is that bad. In fact, when I'm abroad, my trusty AAO is the only computer I use, and it's on for most of the day, every day, and I write documents, script in PHP, dabble in Blender and Python, work in Inkscape and Photoshop, watch videos (online and offline), and even play games.
But anyway, most netbooks have an Intel graphics card. To change the aspect ratio, you should be able to right-click on the desktop and select Graphics Options -> Panel fit -> Maintain aspect ratio. You can also click "Graphics properties" to bring up the Intel control panel (which you can also reach via the regular desktop properties and the Windows control panel).