Oops; missed that on the first reading (didn’t follow the link). :smack:
-
-
- Yea but I know WnXP Home can display in greyscale at least, because it does it every time I go to turn it off: when I press “Start” and then “Turn Off Computer”, another panel comes up the the three “standy-turn off-restart” choices, and the background (whatever is there) “fades” to greyscale…
-
- And we note: monochrome is TWO colors, greyscale is a range of a single color intensity…
~
Actually, I haven’t used a Mac in quite some time that let you set the display to black-and-white. My 7100 would not let you go lower than 8-bit (256 colors or greyscale) and neither will my PowerBook.
Hmm, I have an external display card, I’ll have to see if I can go black-and-white using that…
Just out of curiosity, any of you G4 and G5 Desktop users able to set your displays to black-and-white?
Nope. Not through the OS anyway.
Neither MacOS 10.2 or 10.3 will let you set the number of colors below 256. In fact there are only three choices for pixel depth: “256 colors” (8-bit), “thousands” (16-bit), and “millions” (24/32-bit).
MacOS 10.2 really really doesn’t want you to set the colors to 256. It hides the option from you, and you have to practice some sort of trickery to conjure it up. (I’ve forgotten what the trickery is, since I’ve been on 10.3 for many months now. And I didn’t especially want that display mode anyway; I was just horsing around.) MacOS 10.3, in contrast, doesn’t hide the option, but the desktop appearance is still pretty poor in that mode, as it also is under 10.2.
Moreover, in neither case do you have the grayscale option for 256-color mode, as you do under classic MacOS. You’re given a default 256-color palette, and that’s that. Dynamic, indexed color palettes are a thing of the past, except perhaps for games that take over the screen. These can do whatever they wish with their 8-bit pixel values. Even for them though, lower depths are not supported.
However, back in the desktop, the OS does let you choose from a variety of “display profiles”, which corresponds to Apple’s older ColorSync technology. A display profile basically defines the mapping between RGB color space and the color space of your particular display device. Theoretically you could design and install your own profile that maps true RGB to a grayscale subset of RGB. Or even from true RGB to one-bit monochrome. Perhaps someone somewhere has done this, just for kicks.
But no such profiles are supplied by Apple — or at least, no such profiles exist on my system, and it’s not like I’ve been going around deleting system files just for the fun of it. (Not consciously anyway.)
[QUOTE=mythos99]
<snip>the screen goes to black and white while the changes are being made, then goes back to color, so Windows XP Pro must have that ability and have a settting somewhere to make the monitor show only in black and white, Thanks for your help and everyone else’s. </snip>QUOTE]
The above seem to make sense, but in browsing for an answer, I have realized two things. One: Windows sucks. Two: It may be simply a matter of a few lines of code, but windows is closed source, and the programmers have no interest in making novelty features easy to access. Three: Windows sucks.
That in mind, it seems like it would be easy to make an ordinary VGA monitor display in B&W, with both OS/2 or Linux. As people have already posted, it can also be done in Macs. Heck, I’ll bet you can even do it in the newest version of BeOS , Yellow Tab, though I would not bet a substancil amount of money.
I suspect it’s just something in the API - regardless of how colours are coded in applications (i.e. whether they pick up the current Windows theme or whether they explicitly say ‘display this bit in red’), they’re still ultimately making requests to the API*; the bit that fades to greyscale on shutdown probably just override/ignores these requests.
While we’re here, and without wanting to turn this into a Windows slag-a-thon, does anyone agree that the fade to greyscale thing is poorly implemented in WinXP? - you click Start>shutdown and the shutdown options dialog appears, as the colour fades gracefully away from the rest of the display, except that when you click any of the shutdown options, the colour abruptly returns and the machine then shuts down. I wouldn’t have done it that way myself.
*this might not hold true for applications that use OpenGL or DirectX or similar