Rich wrote:
Because regardless of whatever the DAC was doing in old-skool VGA land, the GIF file would retain all 8-bits of precision. The WinFract and xfractint code would have retained all 8-bits of precision. The remaining code in fractint that does computation on color values would have retained all 8-bits of precision.
It comes down to what the purpose of the program fractint is, and we, the authors, decided it was not first and formost a palette manipulation program. Since no more than 6 bits can be displayed, storing more than six bits was moot.
Never mind the fact that eventually VGA drivers caught up to the normal world of graphics and had 8-bit channels in their DACs. How long have VGA cards had 8-bit channels in DACs? I'm willing to bet its been at least 10 years.
The answer (as far as I know, just did a cursory check) is VGA cards still have 6 bit DACs. Since modern cards focus on true color, there has been little vendor motivation to change legacy 256-color modes. And weird as it sounds, features like palette rotation preceded fractint's adoption of GIF. None, of this, of course, has any bearing on your question about any current downside of expanding from six bits to 8 in the Windows program. I don't know of any. Tim