You can’t let a broken CRT monitor stand in your way (backchannel.com)

I remember using Norton Disk Editor in the early 90's to fix directory entries (and occasionally break them!). I learned some fantastic lessons about backups and how to recover from mistakes.

This is the reason that I'm firmly stuck in the Android camp (on devices that I can root). I'm one a very, very small minority though.

Curious terminology.

A high resolution text mode being stable, but a low-res graphics mode going haywire is almost certainly an issue with the display adapter and not the cathode ray tube.

I instinctively went for the shift keys fractions of a second after seeing that Sidekick menu.

The TSR I wrote was simple in comparison: it constantly refreshed the palette. A palette entry with a red value greater than zero had its blue and green values increased accordingly. The red component was then zeroed out.

Necessity is a powerful impetus for spurring creativity in frugal college students.

This looks to be an earlier version, as it doesn't increase the blue and green values, but gives an idea of how it worked:

    {$M 1024,0,0 }   { 1K stack, no heap }

    USES Crt, DOS;

    CONST
      MAX_COUNT = 384;
      READ_PAL  = $3C7;
      WRIT_PAL  = $3C8;
      RED       = 1;
      GRN       = 2;
      BLU       = 3;

    VAR
      OldIntVec : PROCEDURE;
      NoRed     : ARRAY[ RED..BLU, 0..255 ] OF BYTE;
      Count     : INTEGER;
      Colour    : BYTE; 

    PROCEDURE ReadPalette;
    Begin
      FOR Colour := 0 TO 255 DO
      Begin
        Port[ $3C7 ] := Colour;
        NoRed[ RED, Colour ] := Port[ $3C9 ];
        NoRed[ GRN, Colour ] := Port[ $3C9 ];
        NoRed[ BLU, Colour ] := Port[ $3C9 ];
      End;
    End;

    PROCEDURE ChngPalette;
    Begin
      FOR Colour := 0 TO 255 DO
        IF NoRed[ RED, Colour ] <> 0 THEN
          NoRed[ RED, Colour ] := 0;
    End;

    PROCEDURE WritePalette;
    Begin
      FOR Colour := 0 TO 255 DO
      Begin
        Port[ $3C8 ] := Colour;
        Port[ $3C9 ] := NoRed[ RED, Colour ];
        Port[ $3C9 ] := NoRed[ GRN, Colour ];
        Port[ $3C9 ] := NoRed[ BLU, Colour ];
      End;
    End;

    {$F+}
    PROCEDURE NewTimer; INTERRUPT;
    Begin
      InLine( $9C ); { PUSHF -- Push flags }
      OldIntVec;

      IF Count = MAX_COUNT THEN
      Begin
        Count := 0;

        ReadPalette;
        ChngPalette;
        WritePalette;
      End
      ELSE
        INC( Count );
    End;
    {$F-}

    BEGIN
      Count := MAX_COUNT;

      GetIntVec( $1C, @OldIntVec );
      SetIntVec( $1C, Addr( NewTimer ) );
      Keep( 0 );
    END.

I remember trying to get SimCity 3000 Unlimited to run on my Windows XP laptop. The laptop was 10 years old, and the game was even older, meant to run on Windows 98 if I remember right. The game refused to run in anything but 16 bit color mode, while 32 bit was the default on XP. I thought maybe I could fiddle with the compatibility options on the shortcut, but all it had was a checkbox to run in 8 bit mode. I could go into XP's graphics options and manually switch to 16 bit mode, but that would be annoying to do every time I wanted to play the game, and then undo it afterwards.

I thought maybe I could write a batch script to do it, but Windows XP didn't have anything built in to change the color mode from the command line. Thankfully there's a program out there called QRes that does just that. I wrote a script that switched the color mode to 16 bit, ran SimCity, then waited for it to terminate before switching back to 32 bit.

Setting that up was more fun that actually playing the game.

Likely burned out after many years of use.

This is the tool I made to make it brighter:

https://github.com/macondobits/gamma

It resides in the system tray, remembers profiles, and it could be useful for someone else.

I will upload the gamma.exe file to github one of these days, or sooner, if anyone wants it.

The great and unexpected thing, it even works in Wine and changes the gamma ramp in Ubuntu. I use xgamma in the command line instead of my own tool, but I'm glad it works.