@teqman said:The same thing would happen when you palette-swapped on Win3.1. It was typical among games, but often unnoticed because games would go full-screen before swapping the palette.Come to think of it I think this behavior is actually part of the VGA standard too.
Ah, you might know. Windows 3.1 set aside a block of 20 colours for itself -- the "standard" 16, plus four more truly useless colours on top (mint green, peach, lilac and mid-grey, but no orange). It's been a long time, but was it possible to ever re-allocate those, or were they reserved to keep the system interface usable?
There's a toy called LavaLamp for Win 3.1 which, if you ask it to remap all 256 palette entries, it crashes, both under Win 3.1 and in 2000. You can only set it to remap 236 or lower. My best guess has been that Windows won't let you change the reserved colour set, but I don't know.
The Real WTF is that the Cirrus Logic GL5426/8 drivers allocated a different standard 16 to Microsoft's drivers, breaking all my icon editors (for some reason they draw black if you alter the reserved colour set to something else). I rang up Microsoft and asked if they had any generic drivers for 1024x768 resolution, but an angry Scots woman insisted that no video drivers shipped with Windows. Of course they did, but just not 1024x768 :/