Help, PowerBook 190cs accidentally set colors to thousands of colors!

wottle

Active Tinkerer
Oct 30, 2021
698
442
63
47
Fort Mill, SC
So, I was messing around with my PowerBook 190cs and I noticed in the Control Strip, it allowed me to select thousands of colors. So I selected it... Big mistake! Basically the screen when a slightly odd shade of gray. No problem, I thought, I will restart and zap the PRAM using the Cmd-Opt-P-R, which should put it back to the default of 256 grays? Nope. I can see the MacOS startup screen briefly and then the new color depth gets set and I'm back to an odd gray screen.

So I restart with extensions off to see if I can change the display settings. And I successfully get it to boot with a screen that works. Unfortunately, none of the control panels work to try to change the display color depth.

OK, maybe a fresh install of 7.1 from an external BlueSCSI? I can boot 7.5.3 off my BlueSCSI (it's what I had on the SD card), and I can get the Legacy Software CD loaded up. Unfortunately, I can't seem to get it to mount the IDE drive. So I can boot awkwardly from the external SCSI with the weird adapter that sticks out vertically. And since the adapter doesn't seem to provide termination power, I have to power the BlueSCSI with a microUSB cable. But the bigger problem is I can't seem to get SCSI and IDE drives to both mount at the same time.

So, can someone enlighten me to how I can change the color depth of the screen without being able to see the screen after it boots.

OR

Is there something I need to load on my BlueSCSI's HD image to get it to be able to mount the IDE drive in the PowerBook?
 

wottle

Active Tinkerer
Oct 30, 2021
698
442
63
47
Fort Mill, SC
That did it! I forgot about the Preferences in the system folder. I deleted the Display Preferences from there and restarted, zapping the pram and I’m back in business. Thank you so much!
 
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