bad color depth in osx

[Tommy Trussell]

On 8/2/05, tristan <tristan at open3net.com> wrote:
> hi there, i got a problem with mol and my powerbook G4 17'' (nvidia)
> i can run startmol -X, osx starts successfully, BUT,
> display is garbaged, it seems that color depth is not correct, only 16
> colors displayed.
> 
> any clue? what could cause this? is it due to my framebuffer config?
> my terminal screen VT1-6 is in high resolution, but i don't know where i
> could configure the color depth for console framebuffer...
> on x86 machines, i append vga=791 to kernel parameters in grub, but on
> ppc?

I have a similar issue, though I am using OS 9 and the problem is sporadic. 

You can add the framebuffer parameters using your boot loader ... I
use BootX on this old PowerBook G3 Series (aka "PDQ" or "Wallstreet
II"), and my boot parameters look like this:

video=atyfb:vmode:14,cmode:8,mclk:71 root=/dev/hda11 apm=on

My driver is obviously atyfb, and as you can see the parameters are
cryptic. On Debian I could pass a parameter like 1024x1068-16 and it
would work but for some reason that doesn't work in Ubuntu Hoary. Your
driver will be nvidia with its own parameters and of course you're
using yaboot or something on your new-world Mac, so check the docs for
your bootloader.


Here's the problem I see on mine: After the first boot of my system,
when I run MOL some parts of the color map seem to get trashed (making
the colors shift strangely), but after I restart X, running MOL
doesn't seem to affect the colors. All I can figure is maybe it's
setting the color depth to 8 the first time and then when X restarts
it sets it to a higher depth. I had trouble getting the boot
parameters to work at all so I don't want to experiment TOO much. ...
Looking at dmesg it's apparent that my framebuffer is complaining
about something because there are lots of debug messages from atyfb,
so there very well could be a problem with my settings.