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Enabling 24-bit color in Windows XP Mode

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Before I get started today – I want to make one thing very clear: the content of this post is not officially supported by Microsoft.  Feel free to try it out – but if you hit problems do not go contacting Microsoft Product support – as this is unsupported.

With that out of the way:

When using Windows XP Mode the display is limited to using 16-bit color.  If you try to change this you will see that you cannot:

24bitcolor

For most situations – 16-bit color works fine.  However, there are some applications that require greater color depth.

It is possible to get 24-bit color support by doing the following:

  • Start Windows XP Mode
  • Run regedit
  • Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services
  • Create a new DWORD value with a name of ColorDepth and a value of 4
  • Restart the virtual machine

After doing this you will see that you now have 24-bit color support.  Now – to answer a couple of obvious questions:

  • If this is unsupported – why is this option even there?  Use of 24-bit color is supported on Windows Server 2003, but it is not supported on Windows XP.  This is a case where you can enable this on Windows XP due to similar components being used.
  • Why is it not supported – it seems to work?  While it works in many cases, there are times (which I have seen myself) where programs that work correctly with 16-bit color do not work correctly with 24-bit color.
  • 24-bit isn’t good enough, I need 32-bit color depth?  Your best option here is to disable integration mode.  This will put you back on our emulated video card – that can support 32-bit color depth (but you lose all of the nice integration features).

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2011
    And also the AllowFontAntiAlias option to allow ClearType over RDP/RemoteApp/XP Mode.

  • Anonymous
    October 10, 2011
    Thanks Ben and xpclient

  • Anonymous
    October 11, 2011
    Note that setting "AllowFontAntiAlias" is supported

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2012
    Great, now I cannot start Windows XP mode.

  • Anonymous
    December 02, 2012
    how work this on windows 8 pro with hyper-v ? thats dont work how u describe it =( need your help need 24 bit color mode that i  can start my programms :(

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2013
    This does not work. I have the proper registry value set and only 16 bit color is available.

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2014
    Thanks this is is a lot batter then using 16Bit Color on Windows 7 64Bit.