Hey guys! Currently, I''m now half-way at Chapter 6 of LaMothe''s "Tricks of the Windows Game Programming Gurus", and I would like to ask : 1) What is a Palette for? 2) When do we use it? 3) Is it good to use Palettes? Or RGB full color modes? 4) Lastly...what''s Mode X? Thanks!!!!!! :-D "The feeling of mastering and understanding hard stuff in Game Programming is just like the feeling u get when u perform an Air-Walk in the basketball court, soaring.....and everyone''s watching in awe......."

1) In an 8bit image you have 256 colors available to you for use. This is out of a possible 16.5 million colors available. Because 256 colors is so little in comparison, we are allowed to choose which 256 colors out of the 16.5 million we want to use. This is called a palette. A palette is basicaly an array of 256 RGB Values. Or you could equate it to a painters palette which they use to put their paints on and mix before painting on the canvas.

2) You use palettes for 8bit (256) color images.

3) It all depends on the situation. You can do some real cool effects with palettes, that are abit more difficult to achieve in full color modes. However on the reverse side of things, in full color mode every bitmap on the screen at the same time does not need to have the same palette. You decide which is best for your current situation.

4) ModeX is a old DOS Graphics mode. Not realy anything you need to know or worry about. Durring it's time Mode X allowed programmers to create games of decent graphical quality in DOS.

Edited by - evaclear on July 14, 2001 12:44:02 PM

Mode-X was something really great! I was able to do 360x480 resolution graphics with plain VGA :D. 320x400-mode was very nice too, since it was really easy to trick the viewer to believe there was more colors than 256. Anyway... Mode-X is obsolete nowadays so you should forget it .
I really miss those times...