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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Steven, what video chip/card actually displays either 8 or 12 bit color
for you?  None of mine do.  One SiS chip which does not even produce 8-bit
color, according to list-modes, defaults to something else when I try to
set Xvesa to 8-bit (I think it actually shows 4-bit).  Perhaps the card
you are playing with cannot even display 8-bit, which would explain why it
looks the same as 4-bit color.

The others (S3, anyway - and I think also Trident and Tseng and ATI)
display something unusable (blue stripes, funny colors) when you ask for
8-bit (they do list 8-bit with Xvesa -listmodes).  When I try to run cards
at 12-bit, they all run at 15 bit (or 16 if there is no 15 available), or
at least they occupy exactly as much RAM as 15 (or 16) bit.  I emailed in
this info a while back.  

I have been testing only VESA 1.2 PCI video cards with 2M RAM.

I can see a big difference in image quality between 4-bit (looks terrible)  
and 8-bit (a bit blotchy at times but usable) with regular X, but I can't
get Xvesa to display 8-bit.  Since we are not using X of any sort on any
laptops, this is not a problem for us but I can see how it would be for
other people.  Are there some laptops which WILL display 8-bit color with
Xvesa?  Our only color laptop is not even VESA compatible (but it does
640-256 colors in DOS).  
 
> I've played around with the different Xvesa settings, and I can't 
> see an actual improvement going from plain 640x480 to 640x480x8.  
> I choose 640x480x12 for the menu because 12 is the lowest number 
> that appeared to provide any benefit for Xvesa.  If you are sure 
> that Xvesa actually (not just theoretically) displays more colors
> at 640x480x8 than it does at 640x480, please tell us.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steven
> 
> 
> 
> 
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