4 ms·

RISC OS 3.11 (which was approximately contemporaneous) went a step further and allowed users to define the system palette LUT arbitrarily using the !Palette uti

• mschaef 6y ago
  > RISC OS ... allowed users to define the system palette LUT arbitrarily For 8-bpp LUT graphics, Windows 3.x had a palette negotiation mechanism in the API that reserved 20 color entries to the OS and let the focused app control the remaining 236. Applications that weren't focused got a combination of whatever was left over and dithering to fill in the gaps. (In 4-bpp modes, the palette was entirely fixed.) This wasn't necessarily a bad solution to limited hardware, but non-LUT modes with 16 bits of depth were a huge, huge improvement once they were available.