Pointer (Prefs) opening in new screen

[levellord]

Hi!


I've been lurking since forever but never had a need to register or ask questions because whatever I was looking for, was already answered, except for this one time


I've searched the forums here and was not able to find anything similar, and I spent good few hours to find a resolution to the issue I am experiencing without any success. OS I am running is AOS 3.2 with GFX card on 1280x1024 if needed. Until earlier today I was able to open Pointer utility (from the Prefs drawer) in the Workbench window. I was switching between DOpus 4.16 and Pointer and at one point touched configuration file in DOpus when the config screen starts opening only half-way. I was able to fix this by installing DOpus 4.17, but the Pointer is now opening in it's own screen, without being set up that way. I've checked out the icon information, compared info with the original files from the installation disk and restarted the system without any luck to make it open in the window.



Does anyone know why is this happening and how to fix it? I would really appreciate the help!


Attached images are the pointer screen, icon file and icon tooltypes.


Thanks in advance!

[thomas]

Pointer prefs needs some free pens on the screen. If the Workbench screen does not have enough pens, it opens its own screen.

Maybe the Workbench screen does not have enough colors (in ScreenMode prefs) or you've installed a program which occupies all pens, like FullPalette for example.

[levellord]

You were right Thomas, thank you so much for your reply. Switched to 16 bit palette from 8 bit and it worked. I would never thought this is a thing.

Installed program which occupies all pens, that have to be some resident program running in the background, correct? It can't be DOpus if I changed it's palette within, and not if I run Pointer just after reboot before DOpus?

Thank you again Thomas, much appreciated!

[thomas]

The background image (WBPattern) can also need many pens.

It could also be that the new version of DOpus allocates pens permanently while the older version only allocated them when needed with the danger to fail.

The pen sharing system tries to let each app use the colors it needs. But it cannot conjure up more palette entries than there are.

Programs like FullPalette work against this system. FullPalette lets the user fix all palette entries so that no other program can change colors. But this also means that programs like Pointer prefs which require pens exclusively will fail to allocate their pens.

[levellord]

Thank you again, this answers my question and I know exactly why the system run out of colors. I changed the screen backdrop with the image using 256 colors, most of them shades of gray. Per your response, I can only imagine that the other programs ran out of needed colors, in this instance the Pointer, and starts opening in new screen. I will not go with the FullPalette as I can easily reduce the amount of colors in the backdrop and see how that can work. Thank you for explaining this to me, I really appreciate it.