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.
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.
