If you're using certain video drivers, Mesa 2 can have black toolbar buttons. Of course, when I was using the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5440 video chip that came with my computer, I had them. The drivers for it were Warp 3 drivers from 1995, and my attempts to get Cirrus Logic to correct this problem failed. This is a guide to that. By the way, for the Cirrus Logic chip, this applies to any of the 65536-color resolutions. There is no problem under 256 colors or 16-million colors.
I don't think so. With the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5440, there are lots of color-corruption problems. It taught me that even stable drivers can be bad. For instance, in OS/2 Chess, all of the chess players are white! That doesn't contribute to understanding the Mesa 2 problem, though.
The problem can be best described by screen shots. If you have PMView, take a screen shot of anything on your computer. If your colors come back really funky, then you just got the idea. Out of all of the freeware/shareware screen capture programs I could find, the only thing I could use to take a screen shot was Clearlook, and I don't know how Clearlook does it. My guess is that Mesa 2 uses the same methods as a screen shot to save the toolbar buttons.
I think the screen shot process asks for the color of a location on a screen. This will apply to most OS/2 screen shot programs as well as Mesa 2 v2.1.6. Here's an example of the corrupted colors. The Intended color was the color that was there. The Corrupted color was the color as reported by the video driver. It's very colorful if you view it in Netscape, and you might get a chuckle out of it. It's not often that a driver mangles every single color on a function.
Well, you can buy a new video card. I chose the Matrox Mystique, and I haven't looked back. However, you can use the REXX script that's in the Mesa 2 FAQ:
/* */
call RxFuncAdd 'SysIni' , 'REXXUTIL' , 'SysIni'
SysIni('Mesa2.INI','Mesa2','Toolbar','')
SysIni('USER','Mesa2','Toolbar','')
This will fix your toolbar, but it won't start Mesa 2. If you have to fix your toolbar every time you start Mesa 2 (I had to do that), place start mesa2.exe at the end of the REXX script. Put the REXX script in your MESA2 directory.
Yes. Here's the REXX script I used to start Mesa 2 with the custom toolbar kit:
/* This script starts Mesa 2 and loads the custom toolbar michael.mtb . */
call RxFuncAdd 'SysIni' , 'REXXUTIL' , 'SysIni'
/* Uncomment the next line if the Toolbar doesn't get replaced. */
/* SysIni('Mesa2.INI','Mesa2','Toolbar','') */
/* The next line replaces the abacus in the status bar. */
SysIni('Mesa2.INI','Mesa2','StatusBar','')
"mesatool.exe /I:mesa2.ini michael.mtb"
start mesa2.exe
The last two lines start the custom toolbar kit and Mesa 2. This takes a few seconds, so be patient. Also, I think I had to redo all of my buttons. If you make all of your buttons black and white, there will be no problem. The hassles will come when you start to use colors. As you can see from the corrupted colors page, red becomes green, green becomes blue, and blue becomes red. If I wanted green buttons, then I would make my buttons red. That was the case on my computer. Your mileage may vary. Have fun!