Logical Palettes

Logical palettes are required for any Fastgraph program that uses a 256-color virtual buffer. You'll also need to use a logical palette with direct color virtual buffers if you want your programs to run better when using a palette-based display driver. With direct color virtual buffers, the same Fastgraph functions that work with logical palettes apply to Fastgraph's virtual palette, so we'll include the palette management functions in all Fastgraph examples.

Fastgraph provides several functions for working with logical palettes:

• creating a default logical palette

• creating a custom logical palette

• activating or "realizing" a logical palette

• modifying color definitions in the active logical palette

• retrieving color definitions from the active logical palette

We'll introduce Fastgraph's logical palette functions in the following sections.