Hello,

Apparently many programs (eg. Africa, Saga, Worm Wars) when running under OS4 have their menus as black text on a black background.

Is this bug known to Hyperion? Is there a list of known OS4 bugs somewhere? Is there a workaround for this bug?

Thanks.

@Minuous

Are those older programs, perhaps 68k?

#6

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@number6

Well, Africa for example has an OS3 build and an OS4 build, and both exhibit this problem under OS4.

@Minuous

Quote:

Well, Africa for example has an OS3 build and an OS4 build, and both exhibit this problem under OS4.

I hope someone who has tried a program from your list will answer.
However, you could try Modepro and just attempt to run the OS3 builds.
There should be adjustments, once the screen is defined to change the palette under promotion. You can edit each palette for a promoted screen and that might solve the black on black issue.

#6

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@Minuous

It's not a bug, what happens is that the program opens a screen with a custom palette but some of the pens it changed from the default are the same ones used by some intuition GUI elements so you end up with the wrong colors for some gadgets.

The easiest way to fix it is to launch e.g. Africa, then launch Prefs/Screens and click on "Insert open screen" then select the Africa screen.

Then go in the GUI tab, set it to "Like Workbench", set "Use GUI pens" to "Always" (ignore app GUI attr deselected)

Then go in the Palette tab, it should already be set to "Custom" so click on "Edit settings" and in the palette prefs change pen 0 to grey and pen 1 to black, then click Use. Back in the Screen prefs set "Use defined colors" to "Always" and click Use or Save.

Next time you launch Africa it should look a lot better

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@AlexC:

Thanks. So do you mean that it is only pens 0 and 1 that are ever affected by this? because I may be able to change the programs to avoid using those colours, and thus the users can avoid going through all the steps you mentioned.

Last edited by Minuous on 17-Mar-2011 at 10:40 AM.

@Minuous

I only tried Africa and it had changed most or all of the first 8 or 16 pens.

The reason I mentionned the first two pens is because changing these two was enough to make everything readable without messing up the colors in the game.

If you can alter the programs, you might as well make them use pens starting from pen 16 as it isn't very likely that users will have assigned these to gui elements.
[edit] actually Prefs/Pointer seems to use pens 16 to 19 by default so it might be better to start from pen 20[/edit]

By default only pens 0 to 3 are used by GUI prefs, but it's safer to account for users customizing things a little.

Last edited by AlexC on 17-Mar-2011 at 11:11 AM.

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@number6

I know it feels good to run all these old real Amiga programs on OS4 but why hang onto old things like ModePro? It's a hack and OS4 already has a screen promoter.

Then again I've seen an OS4 machine running Miami because Roadshow kept dropping the line. And also seen WBStartup+ on OS4 but it has corrupted gfx.

And who gets the blame for being buggy when this old hacky stuff doesn't work? OS4.

Just wanted to make a point about that. I avoid hacks in my system and use the included OS clean solution where possible.

@Hypex

Quote:

I know it feels good to run all these old real Amiga programs on OS4 but why hang onto old things like ModePro? It's a hack and OS4 already has a screen promoter.

Because the OS4 screen promoter does not offer all of the features of modepro.
Simple as that. Not even close.

Quote:

Just wanted to make a point about that. I avoid hacks in my system and use the included OS clean solution where possible.

Not a bad philosophy. But I've used Modepro since day 1 and not seen a single issue with it. Ditto for toolmanager.

#6

Last edited by number6 on 17-Mar-2011 at 02:31 PM.

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OK, I found the root cause of the problem: the SA_Pens array has been extended for OS4, to include eg. menu colours, and the algorithm used by OS4 for choosing pens for undefined structure elements is not compatible with OS2.x/3.x. Yet again a change made in a thoughtless way which impacts compatibility needlessly.

@Minuous

That's good, if you send me the new source i'll compile a native version

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@number6

Just out of curiousity.. What features does ModePro have that are missing.
Any really essential ones? Or some "nice" extras?

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@number6

Quote:

Simple as that. Not even close.

What features does it provide over Screens?

@Samwel/@Hypex

If you read any of my step/by/steps about VistaPro, you'll see information about how to promote that one particular application through screens, newmode, and modepro. In that case, only modepro got me a huge ham-8 render screen.

It also allowed me to put a ham-8 render screen on top of a lightwave screen.

AdPro and Fred have "visual" screens which are more easily fine tuned to the user's individual needs when created with ModePro, imo.

Although not fully functional, it allowed me to put a ham-8 image in Brilliance with the full Brilliance menu underneath it on the same screen.
I say "not fully functional", because we're talking about some routines in Brilliance that keep it from being totally functional. But the idea that all the menus are there, can load and save, change screen, see the color wells, etc. does show the ability of the screen promotion, imo.

You can adjust sizes of these screens too after they are detected and even move them around. Complicated? Sure, the additional power offered means a steeper learning curve. But I suggested long ago that as people determine the entries required, we could exchange prefs files so no one would have to do all of this themselves. Sadly, no one showed much interest in that.

Perhaps part of that is that OS4 team would undoubtedly like only OS4 elements to be used. I think that's partly true, but we've had 68k programs that have shown interest to the OS4 team, but lack of sources has been the issue. I'm not saying Modepro is one of those programs, but hopefully it illustrates the fact that just because something is not OS4 native, does not make it useless..or relatively safe to use.

If you look at Mike Brantley's pages you'll see some examples. He's done quite a bit with mode promotion, although not always noted as to which method he's employed.

http://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=33280&forum=14

#6

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@Minuous
Quote:

Thanks. So do you mean that it is only pens 0 and 1 that are ever affected by this? because I may be able to change the programs to avoid using those colours, and thus the users can avoid going through all the steps you mentioned.

Better still don't use specific pen numbers but use the appropriate functions to allocate pens to your app.

eg

n = ObtainPen( cm, n, r, g, b, flags)

(with n = -1 ofcourse in this case of course)

or perhaps

color = ObtainBestPen(cm, r, g, b, tag1, ...);


both in graphics lib since some time (v39 at least)


Also avoid overiding the default menu colors. It's a user prefrence in OS4 (and I expect MOS but I don;t specicaklly know about that) so often the user will chosen settings that suit them...



[edit]
Typos
[/edit]

Last edited by broadblues on 19-Mar-2011 at 04:47 PM.
Last edited by broadblues on 19-Mar-2011 at 04:45 PM.

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@broadblues

The programs use their own custom screens, so they shouldn't need to be using ObtainPen() since they own all the pens anyway.

Six, you've made me ModePro convert, so that's what I'm using in AmigaOS 4.1 to handle all the promoting for older programs. Or maybe I should say re-convert, as ModePro was and is my screen promotion tool of choice on my A4000 with AmigaOS 3.9.

Sounds like you've done some fancy footwork with ModePro to get that Brilliance menu to pop up. Too bad Brilliance otherwise is not fully compatible with the new OS.

Last edited by mbrantley on 19-Mar-2011 at 11:35 PM.

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@mbrantley

Quote:

Sounds like you've done some fancy footwork with ModePro to get that Brilliance menu to pop up. Too bad Brilliance otherwise is not fully compatible with the new OS.

It's actually quite a number of screens.
Load Picture - Warning - Brilliance Picture - Brilliance Curtain - etc.

Xeron wrote about one of the routines being adapted, as he tried to get it more fully functional. It should offer some detail into the issues.

Blitter Emulator

#6

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