What do you get if you cross a two headed Titanium with 256 colours?

An extra wide, 256 colour display!

A two-headed Titanium on the ROOL stand at Southwest 2016
A two-headed Titanium on the ROOL stand at Southwest 2016

With two DVI-I sockets on board, one of the selling points of Elesar‘s Titanium is the ability to drive two displays side by side. RISC OS doesn’t (properly) support this, but it can be done by fooling the operating system into treating the two screens as though they are one. The software to do this has been available since February 2016.

Much more recently, an updated ROM image was released in July of this year that allowed the board to use 256 colour screen modes – which might sound odd to make a point of with modern systems (including the Titanium) capable of running with 16 million colour displays, but there is some older software that actually needs to run in screen modes with a more limited colour depth; so called “paletted” modes.

However, the ability to use a 256 colour display had a limitation: It could only be used on a single headed system – so using any software that needed such a screen mode meant foregoing the ability to spread a desktop across two displays.

Until now.

An updated driver has been made available from the Titanium product page (see the Resources tab) that extends (hoho) 256 support to dual headed systems.

It should be noted that there are some manual steps involved in setting up dual headed support that may be unappealing for less technical users. An alternative is subscribe to R-Comp‘s Titanium support scheme. One of the benefits of membership is that R-Comp supply a DualHead application that makes it much simpler and hassle free to set up a Titanium to use two displays. Contact R-Comp for more details.

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