here is the screenshot you asked for. in addition to the pincusion oddity, the display when set to 640x480 16 looks like it is a touch too big for the monitor... but that i think i can live with.

http://upload.localnetsys.com/upload/dump0048.jpg

Looks like some bad dithering in 16-bit. What machine are you running on?

--mcn

Some video cards have a really bad 16 bit dither.
I really notice it with a rage128 on the mac in 16bit mode.

32bit modes don't really make the game any slower and it makes the game look nicer, so I'd recommend changing to a 32bit color mode.

i am using a g3/300 beige mac with an ati radeon 7000. last night i switched to 800x600 because 640x480 looked off centered when i started. after seeing the pincusion thing i decided to go back to 640x480 and everything seemed normal again.

when i log in tonight i'll check it again just to see if it was only a weird fluke.

i'll try switching to 32 bit too... i thought this was the cause of my jitteryness when approaching stations..... man i need to buy a new mac :D

thanks ray and mburrack. :)

Oh heh 300MHz? The Radeon 7000 should handle the 32bit mode fine. You may have to turn down texture resolution depending on how much video ram you have.

The off-centered problem may be a result of VO choosing a refresh rate that your monitor's centering controls aren't adjusted for. Just change the v/h pos/sizes on your monitor and it should be fine.

yeah, the 800x600 thing is definately not a fluke. though i did start using 32 bit mode and wow.. it is a beautiful universe! i even got brave and tried it at 1024x768 and found it to be usable as well... though still needs some tweaking on my behalf to get rid of jitters around stations and lots of asteroids.

anyway, i believe that concludes this post. again, thanks for your help guys... it is nice to know help is just a short message away.

oh and fyi... the radeon 7000 i have is using 32meg ddr ram as i remember.... great card as long as i don't try using hardware acceloration in Linux. but that is a different can of worms all together :)

later guys.