Would you be able to record a short video (using dosbox's built-in recording) of the broken palette behavior and upload it somewhere?

go and get a fantastic pm6100 and put a doscard in it.
So you can play both versions 😀

jmarsh wrote:

Would you be able to record a short video (using dosbox's built-in recording) of the broken palette behavior and upload it somewhere?

I could, theoretically, but it's basically that the palette is permanently wrong as shown on screenshots like here and here.

In fact, I was able to fix the palette post factum in screenshots taken via DOSBox (when I was still playing around with the demo version back in 2015) by extracting the right palettes from the demo data file with the help of Hallfiry's tools and then loading them into each screenshot made in DOSBox (more details here).

I suspect that Executor somehow fails to properly load some of the palettes. For example, at startup, the title screen will briefly show up like this but then revert to the normal palette. The same happens with the win/lose screens which will be rendered briefly in wrong colours before switching to their respective normal palettes. Similarly, if you at any time during a mission select "About Warcraft" from the menu and then close this window, the screen will briefly show up like this, which is a 100% match of the palettes that I restored by extracting them from the data files.

UPD: I just watched a video of how the game is emulated with QEMU and I am now almost certain that the observed palette glitches are related to the fade-in and fade-out animation effects during the display of the logo, the menu, mission briefings etc., because Executor does not do any such effects at all.

Xermald'Oh wrote on 2018-01-20, 23:26:

-Dark Forces (CD version). The game seems to run fine on highest settings at 640x400 except for the fact that I could not get the mouse to work.

mouse works