Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uwm.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald
From: mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.windows.ms
Subject: Re: Considering using Windows
Message-ID: <245400033@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 14 Nov 89 01:40:42 GMT
References: <3288@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Lines: 24
Nf-ID: #R:hydra.gatech.EDU:3288:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:245400033:000:1148
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!mcdonald    Nov 13 08:42:00 1989


>  1) I read somewhere that Windows only supports 8 colors. Is this true?
>     If I have a VGA board that supports maybe 64 or 256 simultaneously
>     displayable colors is there any way to access these colors through
>     Windows? If not are there any workarounds? Is v3.0 going to support
>     more colors?

I have been unable to find a 16 color for either a plain VGA or
my Viseo 7 VGA-16 in 600x800x16 color mode. They should exist.
I DO have and use a 256 color 400x640 driver for the VGA-16, and it
works fine. Some poorly written programs do bomb, however, while
some others don't bomb but say "cannot create bitmap".

More than 8 colors is very nice, as you can get white text on a 
solid non-black background. As you may have noticed, a black
background causes problems with visibility of buttons.

For my normal 8-color driver, I have gone to the disgusting length
of making a tiny Windows program that changes the VGA palette
of MAgenta to a dark blue every half second (you have to keep doing it
to reset it after running a DOS program full screen.)
I set my window background to magenta, and it comes out dark blue.

Doug McDonald