Re: 256 color mode and ximtool
Re: 256 color mode and ximtool
- Subject: Re: 256 color mode and ximtool
- From: Jeremy Huddleston <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:42:09 -0700
On Sep 19, 2008, at 14:33, email@hidden wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008, Jeremy Huddleston - email@hidden wrote:
If your apps really *need* 256colors, you need to change the output
settings of the server in X11 preferences to 256 colors and restart
the server. 8bit visuals in the TrueColor server are buggy.
I used to run two copies of X11.app (not in Leopard) with one using
TrueColor and the other PseudoColor. (This also allowed me to use
xhost +hostX in one of the X servers since the machine I connected
to did not have sshd.) That worked great in 10.3 and also 10.4 (I
think I got a harmless error message in 10.4). In any case since 256
did not work with Leopard I found a workaround. I run Xvnc with the -
cc 3 -depth 8 options and run my old program in there. Also it seems
I cannot run two X11.apps anymore so that approach would not work
anyway.
Jeremy, it looks like you want to make it so that when you run the
Xserver it will have a number of TrueColor and one PseudoColor
visual. Wow that will be neat if you get that to work. I think I
remember that on an old SGI Indy but that had hardware support for
something like this. Is that what you are going after?
yes, that is the goal.
If so that should allow us to run our old stuff inside one X11.app
seamlessly. I just want to warn you that I think back in the 10.2
beta of X11.app or one of the 10.3 versions something like that was
there and it was really broken and then it went away.
yeah, but hopefully I can get it working...
One thing is that I see some people are saying some behavior is not
right in programs that used to work say in rc5. The PseudoColor
visual when running the server at 24-bit is really broken right now
(and you know that). That may be the reason that those programs
stopped working right. I could see how some programs would first
look for a PseudoColor visual before a TrueColor one. Imagine you
were writing an ANSI terminal emulator ten years ago for example
(before all the font antialiasing stuff and 256 color framebuffers
were still common). Switching colormap entries to get blinking text
would be a whole lot easier than redrawing the window all the time.
Those old programs like that still exist. So I bet until the faked
PseudoColor visual in the 24-bit server is working right, it would
be nice to not use that visual unless the server was using depth 8.
Two steps ahead of you... that's already how it is in git. ;)
Okay now for my experiences with 2.3.1 running in 256 color selected
in the X11.app preferences and my old program which I pounded on a
bit harder. It seemed to work fine for a bit. Then suddenly the
background in my xterm turned purple. This program only uses maybe 8
colors, this color of purple being one of them. It seems that maybe
there is some color allocation bug where it gives new indexes for
colors that are already in the colormap. (I think this program owns
the colormap.) Now what next happened is I opened a new xterm and it
was all fine (no purple). Then I clicked to focus the first xterm
and the background came back to normal except for a verical stripe
at the right side of the xterm. I saw no affect on the other program
(maybe if I had focused it after that I would have). I minimized the
xterm and then clicked on it in the dock to bring it back and it was
again normal (with no purple stripe).
eh... rr... huh... k.
The other oddity is when I turned on blinking in the plots for the
256 only program. They did not blink. I bet the blinking is done my
messing with the color map and that does not seem to work. I bet to
get that to work right you will need to notice that the colormap has
changed and repaint all PseudoColor windows.
So that is the status of what I have learned. Again Jeremy thank you
very much for your hard work, it is getting much closer to having
256 work again.
If I just had a "real" 256 color program that I could mess with, it
would certainly help things out... are any of these programs easy to
hand off to me?
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