dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Dave Platt) (10/14/87)
Well, I've had my Mac II for just shy of a week now, and I like it lots (will like it even more when my hard-disk arrives, I'm sure). One thing puzzles me, though. I'm almost willing to swear that I've seen the Mac/keyboard/mouse icon in the "Welcome to Macintosh" startup screen appear in color (several different colors, in fact)... and yet when I boot the system nowadays it comes up in black and white. Was I hallucinating when I saw it in color (too much Diet Coke, perhaps?) or does the icon appear in color under certain conditions? If the latter, what are those conditions? Are any of the popular INITs (e.g. Pyro!, Suitcase) capable of interfering with the color display? I'm running a vanilla-hardware Mac II, 5 megs of memory, Apple video card (256-color) and Apple 13" color monitor, and the System and Finder from the System Tools disk that came with the machine).
singer@endor.harvard.edu (Richard Siegel) (10/15/87)
In article <17938@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA> dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Dave Platt) writes: >seen the Mac/keyboard/mouse icon in the "Welcome to Macintosh" startup >screen appear in color (several different colors, in fact)... and yet >when I boot the system nowadays it comes up in black and white. Was I >hallucinating when I saw it in color (too much Diet Coke, perhaps?) or >does the icon appear in color under certain conditions? If the The color settings are dependent on which disk you're booting with. If you (for example) boot up with a floppy, set up the color screens, and then boot from newly created hard drive, the settings are likely to revert to the default. I too was surprised when a similar phenom happened to me, and realized then that the settings aren't stored in Parameter RAM. An aside: you consider 5MB with a 256-color card and a color screen "Vanilla"????! Just what kind of car do you drive, anyway?? :-) :-) --Rich **The opinions stated herein are my own opinions and do not necessarily represent the policies or opinions of my employer (THINK Technologies, Inc). * Richard M. Siegel | {decvax, ucbvax, sun}!harvard!endor!singer * * Customer Support | singer@endor.harvard.edu * * THINK Technologies, Inc. (No snappy quote) *
dplatt@teknowledge-vaxc.ARPA (Dave Platt) (10/15/87)
Thanks to everybody who either posted or mailed responses to my
posting about the color icon in the "Welcome to Macintosh" startup
screen. The universal suggestion was that I should use the Control
Panel's "Monitors" CDEV to set the screen to 16 or 256 colors, close
the control panel, and the shut down and reboot, and the icon would
appear in color.
Now, quite curiously, the disk in question was ALREADY configured to
run in 256-color mode! This was evidenced by the Monitors display
itself, by the colored apple in the menu bar, and the fact that Mesmer
would run (and generate a pretty snazzy display). Yet, still, the Mac
icon on the startup screen insisted on appearing in monochrome.
Just as an experiment, I used Monitors to set the screen to 4-bits (16
colors), and restarted. Lo and behold, the icon appeared in color! I
then set the screen to 256 colors and restarted again, and it was
_still_ in color.
So... somehow the information on the disk I was booting from had
become inconsistent. Perhaps the system-startup code thought that the
screen was in 1- or 4-color mode, while the main monitor-initializing
code knew that the screen was actually in 256-color mode. Or,
perhaps, the color icon ("cicn" resource) had been wiped out of the
System file somehow. In either case, it seems that when I ran the
Monitors CDEV and reset the screen to 16-color mode, the information
was restored to a complete and consistent state.
How did it get out of sync? I do have a suspicion. I'm running a
one-floppy, no-hard-disk Mac II, and typically boot up a 3-meg Ramdisk
using RamStart 1.23 (1.4 doesn't seem to work... it bombs when trying
to copy the files into the new ramdisk). RamStart is the startup
application; it creates the ramdisk, copies the startup floppy's
contents to the ramdisk, ejects the floppy, and exits to the Finder in
the ramdisk. Well, I had originally configured the startup floppy to
run in monochrome mode, as I was testing out some animation programs
that don't run well in deep-pixel mode. A few days ago, I decided to
reconfigure the startup floppy to come up in 256-color mode, and did
this by resetting the screen WHILE I WAS RUNNING IN THE RAMDISK and
then dragging the ramdisk's System file back to the startup floppy. I
think that this was my fatal mistake! Some digging around in the
RamStart "help" information last night reminded me that RamStart does
some arcane things to the System file when copying it to the
ramdisk... certain resources are stripped out, and the ramdisk doesn't
contain the boot-blocks needed to start up a Mac.
So... I suspect that I corrupted my startup floppy by dragging an
incomplete or otherwise-incorrect System file from the ramdisk.
Apparently, re-running the Monitors CDEV undid some of the damage. I
plan to complete the cleanup by replacing the System file on the
floppy with the one from the System Tools distribution.
Live and learn...
Richard Siegel commented,
> An aside: you consider 5MB with a 256-color card and a color
> screen "Vanilla"????! Just what kind of car do you drive, anyway?? :-) :-)
Yup... it's vanilla 'cause it has only Apple hardware in it; if I put
a third-party hard disk or second floppy drive in it, it'll have a
different flavor. It's certainly a good-sized scoop of vanilla,
though!
... and I drive a '72 Volvo with 150,000 miles on it... how else could
I have scraped together the money for a II? ;-}
Thanks again to all who offered advice!
-dave-