[crossfire] cfclient colouring

[Mark Wedel]

Brendan Lally wrote:
> On 2/1/06, Mark Wedel <mwedel at sonic.net> wrote:
>> Brendan Lally wrote:
>>   actually, I don't think there is anything specific about using 16 colors.  I
>> think it was just that 16 colors were used - it could very well be 12 or 25 - as
>> far as X is concerned, it doesn't care (unless someone only had 4 bit color, but
>> I don't know if such hardware ever existed).
> 
> ega cards on (very) old IBM PCs support only 16 displayable colours, I
> don't know if they can run X though. - in any case their resolution
> probably wouldn't be enough to show the entire screen.

  And they'd have the same issue with all the graphics themselves - I can't 
imagine that the existing graphics reduced to 16 colors would look very good.

> 
>>   Private colormap is a leftover from 8 bit display - most 8 bit hardware could
>> only display 256 different colors at a time, but out of the palette of 16
>> million (24 bit color).  So one would use colormaps to determine what colors of
>> the palette your are drawing.
> 
> Is that why I have seen colours shift with application focus on very
> old sparc systems running X?

  Yep.  Since only 256 colors could be displayed at a time, if you want best 
image selection, you'd allocate a private colormap so one could get all 256 
colors for their own application and not share those with other applications.