[Pres]

Note that this is not a serious problem, just something I noticed just now and fixed. Maybe this'll be helpful to somebody.

First, my system is a 17" flat-panel iMac, 1GB RAM, running Mac OS X 10.2.3.

I was running the screensaver just now and noticed really obvious banding, which I'd definitely never seen before. Like, totally obnoxious banding - about the correct colors, but just not a smooth blend. Unfortunately I didn't have the presence of mind to try taking a screenshot, to see whether it was a problem that would show up that way... I have the aquarium set to ramp the background lighting of the aquarium, so I was seeing the background full of color bands that were smoothly moving up or down the screen (depending on whether it was getting darker or lighter at the time). As I recalled somebody here on the forum mentioning something like this (IIRC, it was on a PowerBook?), I took note.

I immediately tried stopping the screensaver and re-starting it by putting the mouse in the corner of the screen; no change.

I opened the Displays preference pane, verified that I was in Millions of colors, then switched it to Thousands then back to Millions again. The banding was still there.

I logged out and back in; still no change.

Then I restarted the machine, and the banding was gone!

So. Whatever the problem was, it required a restart (of OS X!) to correct. Funky.

I thought it might have been due to my using MacMAME (a game emulator, v0.6.0) because that definitely futzes with the display, but I just tried running a game in it and the screensaver is fine. It's still possible that it was a specific game module within MacMame though...I don't remember exactly which games I played since my last restart!

Anyway it's fixed now, but as I said, hopefully reading this might help somebody who runs into the same situation at some point.

Pres