🚀 go-pugleaf

Thanks to everybody who either posted or mailed responses to my
posting about the color icon in the "Welcome to Macintosh" startup
screen.  The universal suggestion was that I should use the Control
Panel's "Monitors" CDEV to set the screen to 16 or 256 colors, close
the control panel, and the shut down and reboot, and the icon would
appear in color.

Now, quite curiously, the disk in question was ALREADY configured to
run in 256-color mode!  This was evidenced by the Monitors display
itself, by the colored apple in the menu bar, and the fact that Mesmer
would run (and generate a pretty snazzy display).  Yet, still, the Mac
icon on the startup screen insisted on appearing in monochrome.

Just as an experiment, I used Monitors to set the screen to 4-bits (16
colors), and restarted.  Lo and behold, the icon appeared in color!  I
then set the screen to 256 colors and restarted again, and it was
_still_ in color.

So... somehow the information on the disk I was booting from had
become inconsistent.  Perhaps the system-startup code thought that the
screen was in 1- or 4-color mode, while the main monitor-initializing
code knew that the screen was actually in 256-color mode.  Or,
perhaps, the color icon ("cicn" resource) had been wiped out of the
System file somehow.  In either case, it seems that when I ran the
Monitors CDEV and reset the screen to 16-color mode, the information
was restored to a complete and consistent state.

How did it get out of sync?  I do have a suspicion.  I'm running a
one-floppy, no-hard-disk Mac II, and typically boot up a 3-meg Ramdisk
using RamStart 1.23 (1.4 doesn't seem to work... it bombs when trying
to copy the files into the new ramdisk).  RamStart is the startup
application; it creates the ramdisk, copies the startup floppy's
contents to the ramdisk, ejects the floppy, and exits to the Finder in
the ramdisk.  Well, I had originally configured the startup floppy to
run in monochrome mode, as I was testing out some animation programs
that don't run well in deep-pixel mode.  A few days ago, I decided to
reconfigure the startup floppy to come up in 256-color mode, and did
this by resetting the screen WHILE I WAS RUNNING IN THE RAMDISK and
then dragging the ramdisk's System file back to the startup floppy.  I
think that this was my fatal mistake!  Some digging around in the
RamStart "help" information last night reminded me that RamStart does
some arcane things to the System file when copying it to the
ramdisk... certain resources are stripped out, and the ramdisk doesn't
contain the boot-blocks needed to start up a Mac.

So... I suspect that I corrupted my startup floppy by dragging an
incomplete or otherwise-incorrect System file from the ramdisk.
Apparently, re-running the Monitors CDEV undid some of the damage.  I
plan to complete the cleanup by replacing the System file on the
floppy with the one from the System Tools distribution.

Live and learn...

Richard Siegel commented,

>	An aside: you consider 5MB with a 256-color card and a color
> screen "Vanilla"????! Just what kind of car do you drive, anyway?? :-) :-)

Yup... it's vanilla 'cause it has only Apple hardware in it;  if I put
a third-party hard disk or second floppy drive in it, it'll have a
different flavor.  It's certainly a good-sized scoop of vanilla,
though!

... and I drive a '72 Volvo with 150,000 miles on it... how else could
I have scraped together the money for a II? ;-}

Thanks again to all who offered advice!

	-dave-