the elusive PAL option in StepMania's Preferences.ini

2020/08/17 6:08 PM (UTC -5) | tildearrow

this option has been pretty much undocumented for years, that even the StepMania wiki doesn't know what it is for.

PAL
???

you may be thinking this is for arcade operators to operate the monitor in PAL mode (50Hz/Europe), but nope, it's not for that.

apparently the option has no effect...

...but after looking at the source code, I found out what is the PAL option for...

it's for enabling the paletted texture format.
this texture format isn't supported by modern graphics cards at all, with NVIDIA not implementing it after the GeForce FX 5000 cards (17 years ago!) as an example.
perhaps it was intended to reduce memory usage, but...

as graphics cards evolved over the years, this option is pretty much left in the dust...