# DosBox and some other emulators corrupt X11 colors



## RLangham (Dec 1, 2020)

So I'm sorry if this is a common problem that's been answered a lot... I literally don't know the right way to explain the problem I'm having so I could search the forum for it. Basically whenever I start certain programs (all FreeBSD ports installed with pkg) that emulate vintage hardware, such as DosBox, ZSNES, and one of the Commodore 64 emulators (not VICE, I think), it immediately corrupts all the colors on the screen except the emulator's simulated display. In addition it seems to do something to the sub-pixel smoothing of any text that is displayed with that feature, where all the letters get extremely fuzzy and nearly-unreadable.

Technically these programs appear usable, but obviously at the expense of temporarily rendering every other program unusable, as the problem persists until I end the X session and restart it.

Now, by preference I run VTWM as my window manager. It takes up practically no disk space beyond what X11 already takes up, and I just like the interface. Weird, I know. But I've reproduced this bug under different window managers that I downloaded (and quickly deleted) for the purpose of seeing if it was just an incompatibility with the VTWM program. Finally I decided to download XFCE and see if a full-featured desktop environment included driver software to handle this sort of thing. It happens in XFCE too. 

I thought it might be resetting the screen resolution (I've seen emulators do that on Windows, and it could have a similar effect on Windows XP if the color settings were incompatible) but under XFCE I was able to go into the display settings and see that there is no change in the resolution settings.

Is this a driver issue? I'm running on a x86 HP Laptop, and I don't know the model number off hand. I also don't know how to take screenshots on here yet. Sorry!

I'm sorry if this is a noob question! I'm just migrating over to FreeBSD from Windows and LUbuntu, so I'm new to all this! My collection of DOS games is huge and I don't want to have to leave them behind on my failing Windows computer.


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## George (Dec 3, 2020)

You could look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.

In read in some bugzilla post that dosbox switches to vesa. Maybe that's the issue.


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