NetSurf on original Pinebook

I’ve noticed that running NetSurf on a Pinebook using the SD card supplied by R-Comp works as expected, but using the same version of NetSurf on the same machine with a different card with the standard ROOL HardDisc4 components and a ROM built from source the main window just shows graphical corruption. Does anyone have an idea of what might be causing this discrepancy?

I can think of two possible reasons:

1. The ROOL PineBook build isn’t that widely used. Since there are relatively few users, bugs can go unnoticed for a long time.

2. There’s a bug in NetSurf to do with screen mode changes. What seems to happen is that NetSurf can somehow read the mode requested instead of the mode delivered. So, to quote an old-school example, if the user had requested mode 32 (256 colours) but because of hardware limitations mode 31 (16 colours) was selected instead, NetSurf will be trying to construct the page contents as if a 256 colour mode were active: this produces a messy (and often unreadable) display. Workaround is to reselect the current screen mode.

2. There’s a bug in NetSurf to do with screen mode changes. What seems to happen is that NetSurf can somehow read the mode requested instead of the mode delivered. So, to quote an old-school example, if the user had requested mode 32 (256 colours) but because of hardware limitations mode 31 (16 colours) was selected instead, NetSurf will be trying to construct the page contents as if a 256 colour mode were active: this produces a messy (and often unreadable) display. Workaround is to reselect the current screen mode.

Thanks for pointing that out, that’s helped to narrow down the root of the problem. Essentially, I had the monitor configured to “Auto” and was using whatever screen mode the video driver set up, but presumably that wasn’t being done accurately, resulting in the issue you described. For now I’ve worked around it by copying the relevant MDF into !Boot and selecting that manually, but I’ll try to come up with a proper fix at some point.