On a few rare occasions, I've noticed that certain video drivers running under certain versions of the system are not very robust in the way they handle low memory situations in the heap and this can lead to (non-fatal) corrupting of the monitor's look-up tables (LUTs). One or more of your screens may appear black or have odd colorings. Usually you have to reboot because you cannot see to move your mouse around and reset your monitor. Now you can hit the kLUTz FKEY to automatically reset your screen's colors to their gray scale defaults and you can then see to go about recalibrating your monitor. This FKEY will reset ALL your monitors at EVERY possible depth; if it doesn't work, your screen(s) went blank for another reason or the LUTs scrambled, then you crashed. If you are a programmer, developer or person with a just plain erratic system file and have lost information because of this problem then you need this utility as a last resort.
Why I wrote this
This color problem is not caused directly by my PoPSS screen saver, though users may (rarely) encounter it. I am trying to detect the condition in advance and avoid performing color animation at these times, but there is no guarantee that I can anticipate what the system will do; in the future, I will at least be able to restore the default CLUTs which will no doubt upset those people with finely tuned monitors. A utility that sets the size of the system heap to be larger than the default (like Heaptool) may help; so might a new release of the system (hint, hint).
Disclaimer
Nothing this FKEY does should cause your system to crash. If it does, please contact Apple or the supplier of your video driver. I will not be held responsible for poorly written low level drivers when I have followed all the Macintosh programming guidelines.
Installation
There is no sanitary way to install an FKEY. If you have ResEdit, you can open the system file and the kLUTz FKEY file, copy the resource from the kLUTz file and paste it into the System file. The ID# of the resource determines which key will activate the FKEY. The default for kLUTz is Cmd-Shift-6 ('FKEY' resource ID #6). Your System should have at least one FKEY installed when you open it up (Cmd-Shift-3 -- the screen snapshot key, 'FKEY' resource ID #3). There are some shareware programs that can install and manage FKEYs for you as well as some commercial packages that do the same thing. I will not be writing an installer for this FKEY.
Distribution/Legal stuff
This utility can be distributed to anyone for any reason free of charge, for a fat profit or with whatever restrictions that tickle your fancy so long as this text file is included with it. If you use it, I would like to know why you find it useful. Please email imp@eden.com with the applications you are running, your monitor configurations, system version and so on and when the problem comes up.
Copyright 1995 by Wade Riddick. All rights reserved.
