The joys of 256 colour monitors

You may be staring at a version of the Room that is, quite frankly, ugly. Splotchy, nasty and flashing in a variety of vile colours. This is not your fault, it's ours. We've crammed as many bells and whistles as we could in the Room to make it more fun to use and browse, and this inevitably means that some machines can't cope. The problems start to happen when you use Netscape with a 256-colour display (otherwise known as 8-bit, or sVGA colour). With any luck, you'll be able to change your settings to 16-bit colour (thousands of colours/high colour) or even 24-bit colour (millions of colours/true colour). You'll find nearly everything on the Web looks better in 16 or 24-bit colour.

Windows 95 users will find the appropriate settings in the 'display' section of control panels (look in 'Settings' on the start button if you're stuck), Windows 3.11 users can change their settings through either a third party utility which came with your graphics card, or the 'Setup' thingie in your control panels, though this latter is a dodgy option of you don't know what you're doing and you can end up with no display at all and a fair amount of win.ini file grief. Mac users should look in Control panels for the 'monitors' option.

If you're stuck with a 256 colour graphics card or monitor, try closing down any other applications, as Netscape deals with colours more and more badly as your machine runs low on resources. Internet Explorer 3 doesn't have a problem with 256 colour displays, so in extremis you might want to try changing your browser. I hope this helps.