On 07-Feb-00 Jason Barnes wrote:
> to change the screen color depth on the fly? It seems to me that
> there
> must be because otherwise there's no point to having the extra color
> depth
> SubSections in the XF86Config file in the first place, but I haven't
> been
> able to identify what the command is.
You can't change colour depth on the fly.
You can specifiy the default colour depth that X will start in if not
otherwise specified. You can override it with the -bpp option.
> PS: On a mostly unrelated note, why is it that some programs (i.e.,
> xanim, doom) require 8 bit color and can't handle more colors? I
> can
> understand the other way, but it seems to me that it ought to be
> able to
> use a 256-color subset of the available 16.8 million to work in and
> not
> just be completely unable to operate.
(I think) This is because when you have a 256 colour depth then the
colour table is palleted and you allocate colours differently than when
its in a true colour mode (>= 15bpp). Its bascically a programmer
issue, since it is possible to handle this situation easily.
Some X servers provide multiple visuals with different colour depths
(ie AccelX).
Conceivably XFree86 could be patched to provide multiple colour depth
visuals too, but I think it would be a lot of work. Note that if it was
done then you could fairly easily change between colour depths on the
fly (the server would just convert between different depths).
---
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
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