Path: utzoo!attcan!ncrcan!becker!geac!jtsv16!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!shadooby!mailrus!iuvax!purdue!bu-cs!xylogics!world!madd
From: madd@world.std.com (jim frost)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386
Subject: Re: Which 386 Unix offers Vga 256 color X-windows?
Keywords: 640 x 480 x 256, 800 x 600 x 256 ?
Message-ID: <1989Nov17.173951.21899@world.std.com>
Date: 17 Nov 89 17:39:51 GMT
References: <938@nemesis.stsci.edu>
Distribution: usa
Organization: Software Tool & Die
Lines: 35

krist@stsci.EDU (John Krist) writes:
>    I'm contemplating putting Unix on my 386 (Arche Rival).  Reading
>  the recent SCO Unix vs 386/ix review in Unix World (or was that 
>  Unix review?), they author indicated that neither vendor offers an 
>  X-windows which supports 256 colors in the high res VGA and Super-
>  VGA modes.

>    I would need some image display capabilities in whichever version
>  I get, so 256 colors is essential.  Does anyone know if either of
>  these vendors now or is soon going to support these modes (or are they
>  going to wait for the Super VGA standard to be defined?) ?  I intend
>  to probably use an ATI VGA Wonder card.

If I were to take a wild stab on which vendor would be first to
provide a usable 8-bit implementation, it'd be ISC.  They seem to be
very dedicated to producing a good X server.

For the time being, I have some code to do image color depth reduction
which seems to work very well.  It was developed for displaying 8-bit
images on the 4-bit display of the IBM RT (it's a general algorithm)
and seems to work fairly well if you really don't need the full color
resolution.  You can get the software package, called xloadimage, from
expo.lcs.mit.edu via anonymous ftp (/contrib/xloadimage.tar.Z), or
from a recent posting in comp.sources.x.  It currently handles X
bitmap (both X10 & X11), Sun Rasterfile images, Faces Project images,
and PBM images.  GIF and XPM formats will be out soon.  Besides depth
reduction, it does a number of other image manipulations (eg zoom,
brighten, dither).  Might be useful to someone, and it certainly works
for me.

Happy hacking,

jim frost
sofware tool & die
madd@std.com