Exult 1.2 (and 1.4) in OS X 10.6/Snow Leopard.

[ArtfulGamer]

Hi folks. I've been digging through tons of exult threads here and on other forums, trying to figure out why I'm having so much trouble with Exult. When I was running Tiger I had zero problems with the v1.2. But since my upgrade to 10.6 (on my Macbook Pro) I'm getting some strange behaviour, and I was hoping someone had a suggestion on how to fix it.

exult 1.2: The only "scaler" that works in fullscreen is 2xSai. I get a black screen (with music) if I launch exult in fullscreen using the "point" scaler. If I switch exult to point scaling while running the game, I get some psychedelic colour palette switching problem. I get the feeling that exult isn't playing nice with Snow Leopard's SDL visual framework (?)

exult 1.4 (I know this is not stable): Point scaler works, but whenever I double-click on a container, nothing happens. If I double click on the avatar, exult crashes. (I assume this is just a bug/problem in the latest build)

Anyone have a suggestion for getting black gate running in full screen with point scaling on 10.6.2? Either getting 1.2 or 1.4 working on my end would be great.

Many thanks!
- Chris

[Dominus]

The problem with Snow Leopard is that the graphic chips drivers are not fully supporting 8bit colours in fullscreen. To circumvent that problem Marzo coded the (former) 8bit scalers (point, interlaced, 2scalex) into using 16/32bit depending on what is possible.
Can you file a bug report in our tracker on your click problem when in point? Then maybe someone can look at it until I'm back (in about three weeks)
until then best use another scaler

out of curiosity which graphics chip is used on your macbook pro?

[ArtfulGamer]

Ah ha! Thanks for the quick response! That makes a lot of sense - I found the behaviour downright strange. I'll just use another scaler per your suggestion

My MBP has a Radeon X1600.

btw - To clarify my earlier post, 1.4 crashes regardless of the scaler I use. Even hitting "i" to open an inventory gump will crash exult. Seems to be more global than a d-click problem. Shall I submit a bug report?

[Dominus]

Yes, please open a bug report for that. Very strange...

Thanks for yor graphics card report, the problem with 8bit in fullscreen seems to be limited to Amd/Ati Radeon chips.
At least you don't seem to have the "switch to fullscreen" problem which affects all operating systems depending on the capabilities of the screen...

[Dominus]

Another question, since Monto couldn't confirm this container/backpack problem (see the other os x thread), are you compiling Exult yourself or did you try it with our snapsot download?
Either way, before starting Exult, please also start the os x console.app and look for the output of exult in there and copy/paste this here and in your bug report.
Thanks

[ArtfulGamer]

I'm using the snapshot binary, since I've never been able to successfully compile exult in the last 4 years

Will check the other OS X thread and check out the console per your suggestion. Thanks again.