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[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Xvesa will not work with 8-bit color.  It shows some garbage, then X and 
the window manager appear, but the colors are all wrong.

The Xsetup menu offers 12-bit color as a choice.  If your video card 
supports 15-bit color, it actually displays that instead.  If the card 
does not support 15-bit color, it displays 8-bit (badly).  Edit Xconfig to 
change 12 to 16 in this case (or if you simply prefer 16 to the 15 you get 
when you choose 12).

My STB Lightspeed 128 video card (AGP) works badly with Xvesa in BL3.  It 
does not support 15-bit color.  With swm it will not work at all beyond 
4-bit color.  With icewm it works, but displays in purple, pumpkin, or an 
odd shade of blue.  I can however view jpegs in what looks like the proper 
colors.

Different video cards will display the icewm background in slightly 
different shades of olive/teal/blue at various color depths.  Trident for 
instance does dark olive where S3 Virge shows teal.  They are all still 
usable.

I have had the best luck with S3 (Trio64 or Virge), Trident, Tseng and 
Cirrus in Xvesa.  SiS also works.  These also work in SVGAlib (try setting 
chipset VESA to get more color depth for Trident, Tseng, or SiS).

The following X-based add-ons won't work in 4-bit color and since X-vesa 
does not do 8-bit you need a computer with 15-bit or higher support to use 
them.:

xfreecell (cards go off the right edge - game may still be usable)
In 8-bit Xvesa the red kings appear blue.

links2 (it does work in BL2, delilinux version, with SVGAlib, at any of 
the supported color depths including mono, but the links2 compiled for BL3 
does not offer SVGAlib support).  Links-0.90 can be used with xli as a 
viewer instead, but has no javascript.  There is also a links-ssl (CLI)  - 
it is at one of the BL add-on sites?

Abiword - the developers are not interested in making it work with 4-bit 
color.  Try WP8 for linux?

I did not test the other games with 4-bit color.  Matanza is non-X.

My 486 laptops do not support color depth over 8-bit so cannot be used 
with BL3 and the above programs.  I think Steven compiled an Abiword for 
BL2/BL1 - does it also refuse to work in 4-bit color?

Sindi