Thanks to Kevin Marks for great debugging help & diverse ideas.
Thanks to Douglas Adams & my boss Max Whitby for invaluable testing & suggestions.
This version of this software may be given away, but the software is still copyrighted material and is not in the public domain.
So What Is It?
DepthCharge is a control panel device/system extension that lets you rapidly switch the color depth of any screen, without leaving the application you are running. It is designed to work with multiple or single monitors.
Using DepthCharge :
Anytime you want to switch screen depth, just hold down the Control & Command keys, and click anywhere. A popup menu will appear listing the available color settings for the screen you clicked on.
Choose a new depth from the menu and the screen will switch to it. The popup menu also shows whether the screen is currently displaying Colors or just shades of Gray, and lets you switch from one mode to another.
DepthCharge works with Macintosh System Software versions 6.07 & 7.0 and has been tested on Macs including a IIfx, IIci & LC. DepthCharge requires a color machine, and so refuses to load on B/W Macs.
System 7 users :
Put DepthCharge in your Control Panels Folder and restart.
You can then double-click DepthCharge to set the key combination that you need to hold down when you click to popup the screen depth menu. If you try and open the DepthCharge control panel before DepthCharge has had a chance to install inself, the Finder will give you a message like “You cannot use that control panel with this Macintosh”, which basically means the DepthCharge control panel refused to open.
System 6.07 users :
Put DepthCharge in your System Folder and restart.
If your machine is a Mac II, IIx, IIcx or SE30 then you also need to put a copy of 32 Bit QuickDraw 1.2 in your System Folder.
You can find this on the “Printing Tools” system disk, in the "Apple Color" folder.
If DepthCharge is working, it will show up in the Control Panel DA, so that you can set the key combination it uses.
About Version 1.1
This version fixed all known bugs in the INIT code.
About Version 1.2
This version is a cdev (control panel device), so that the user can change the key combination DepthCharge uses.
Known Incompatibilities
The DepthCharge menu will not pop up when running Resorcerer.
HyperCard can crash if you switch depths on it a lot, but this appears to be a HyperCard problem, and happens with all other depth switchers I've looked at.
All previous known problems have been fixed in this version.
DepthCharge was written in MPW Assembler & MPW Pascal.
Internal resources were created with Resorcerer (great editor for cdev writers) & ResEdit 2.1.
