Request of feature for 16bit games

[Aarne Põder]

There are lot of old games which are using natively 16bit graphics
depth. A few popular examples: Age of Empires, Heroes 4, Thief I&II,
Gates of Troy, Rage of Mages II, Icewind Dale I&II, Arcanum: Of
Steamworks and Magick Obscura, etc.

/*
All examples taken from unofficial transgaming wiki
http://cedegawiki.sweetleafstudios.com/wiki
*/


Those games are running very slow in 32bpp desktop. Usually, most
people don't know the reason of slowness. Moreover, knowing of this
issue and changeing your desktop color depth is not good solution. It's
uncomport - requires often restart of X session.

To overcome this problem there are two possible solutions:
1. The easy way: Bring a new launch option into Cedega gui. This option
can be used to launch cedega using command: $startx $CEDEGA_COMMANDLINE
-- :1 -depth 16. For professional programmers this can not take more
than 1 hour work.

2. Hard way: Dynamicly detect the need of change of colormode and launch
new x session inside of running engine.

There was a hope of better solutions using xrandr extension. This was
one of the reasons, why it was so popular poll. Unfortunatly, as I know,
xrandr extension could not be used to change color depth of desktop.

If you can find some time to investigate those issues, most people, who
are voting for "support old games", are very thankfull. (including
me ;-) ).




With best regards,
Aarne Põder,
long time transgamer,
old scool programmer.

[Ove Kaaven]

Post by Aarne Põder
Those games are running very slow in 32bpp desktop. Usually, most
people don't know the reason of slowness. Moreover, knowing of this
issue and changeing your desktop color depth is not good solution. It's
uncomport - requires often restart of X session.

Actually, on XFree86 4.x and later (such as X.org), it may be possible
to improve the performance on 32bpp desktops by setting this config option:

[x11drv]
"ScreenDepth" = "16"

I've never looked into whether this actually works. If it does, someone
could probably create a poll to do these depth adjustments dynamically.