Unable to set desktop to 32-bit color

I have a GeForce 2 MX 400, Linux Mandrake 8.2 and installed the drivers propery. I can't seem to set my desktop colour depth to 32bit colour, if i do, X stops using the nvidia and reverts to "nv" in the XF86Config-4 file and removes the Load "glx".

The max i can choose is 24bit colour, but then games complain that i need to be using 16bit or higher.

am i stuck with 16bit?

[Bern]

From XFree86.org

Depth depth
This entry specifies what colour depth the Display subsection is to be used for. This entry is usually mandatory, but it may be omitted in some cases providing an FbBpp entry is present. The range of depth values that are allowed depends on the driver. Most driver support 8, 15, 16 and 24. Some also support 1 and/or 4, and some may support other values (like 30). Note: depth means the number of bits in a pixel that are actually used to determine the pixel colour. 32 is not a valid depth value. Most hardware that uses 32 bits per pixel only uses 24 of them to hold the colour information, which means that the colour depth is 24, not 32.

I'd like to add that 32 bit color has four channels.. Red, Blue, Green, and an Alpha channel used for transparency effects.. even 24 bit color is usually stored in a 32 bit integer. Even though linux has no support for 32 bit color, most video cards don't accellerate 24 bit color, instead everything is "padded" to 32 bit color I think anyway.

ok thanks for the info guys guess i'll be running hl in 16bit, though in Unreal Tournament you can choose 32.

[Thunderbird]

Using 16bit and then selecting 32 bit in a game doesn't work. X doesn't support depth switching. So when X runs at 16bit all OpenGL apps will work at 16 bit. The same goes for 24 bit. (In quake3 the menu's look a little different when you turn on "32 bit" but it really isn't 24bit / 32 bpp)

well it makes a large differenct in UT if UT is run in 16bit its terrible but 32bit (set in game) and it looks great... maybe best thing for me to do is see if there is an extra command when launching hl to make it ignore the colour depth

[Thunderbird]

Start halflife using:
wine --winver win98 hl

That will do the trick.

[Thunderbird]

Oops forgot something. That --winver switch only works on older versions of wine or on winex. Recent versions of wine use the wine config file.

For example the following to use win98 for all apps

[Version] ; Windows version to imitate (win95,win98,winme,nt351,nt40,win2k,winxp,win20,wi n30,win31)" }, "Windows" = "win98

or [AppDefaults\\app.exe\\version] for a single app.

all fine now... the winver win98 bit was commented out. Of course Half-Life now doesn't perform so well ie half the framerate i got in 16bit but it saves me having to keep switching which usually involves a crash & reboot... Know if there is ways to switch colour depth safely? - I usually set it in the Mandrake control center then do ctrl+alt+backspacee

[Thunderbird]

There's no real good way for switching colour depths. What I would do in your case to play at 16 bit and do the rest at 24 bit is to launch an extra Xserver.

For example create an extra XF86Config-4.hl
Then startx -- :1 XF86Config-4.hl (sometimes depending on the user you are you need to specify the path to the config file too)

Ok thanks a lot for the help ppl, allways like it when i come across helpful forums

I found that if i edit the DefaultColorDepth bit in the XF86Config-4 file then restart the x server it doesn't crash, so that suits me ok.