[Mobhack]

Yes - full-screen 256 colour mode is now an obsolete MSDOS format, which graphics card drivers now rarely support in any meaningful way. Perhaps those companies now give that one to the student intern to write, since there is no longer any need for it to be the red hot video mode of yore, just simply "supported". It is no longer faster than full-colour windows modes as it was a decade or more in the past.

With today's graphics cards centred on DirectX full colour modes, and shifting polygons in 3D modes and so on, its nowadays faster to convert each pixel of the 256 colour palette screen into a high colour palette and then render that surface. Modern video cards may use some of the 3D graphics engine to do this - perhaps with pixel shaders.

So ye olde 256 colour mode is therefore in the same place as the Dodo and the dinosaur - defunct. full screen mode is just a quaint relic of when we had to support the old MSDOS mode back in the windows 95 (and maybe XP) days, when it was faster.

If you have the full game, then you should be playing in windowed mode using the desktop resolution. It will then utilise the current monitor settings, and occupy the full desktop less the area for the task bar at the bottom of the screen. The game runs faster in this mode nowadays as stated above - and you can task switch out to other windows applications with no palette distortion problems when switching back to the game, unlike in full screen mode.