Thorsten,
>> There is a 16 bpp mode - look for 'hicolor' in the source. From my
>> understanding,
>> it has all been wired up right (to be honest, I did only rewrite the fbcon
>> interface
>> for 2.6 onwards, and touched as little of the business end of the driver as
>> possible).
>>     
>
> The mode is named TrueColor in GEM - I just cannot seem to chose it.
> Any hints welcome.
>
>   
Anyone? Do I need special hardware (external pixel clock generation?) to 
use the truecolor mode?
> If all else fails I'll hack a truecolor command line option into atafb :-)
>   
I've played with the framebuffer timing calculations a bit - 16 bpp 
appears to require unreasonably
low hsync frequency in order to keep within the available video 
bandwidth of 32 MHz.

The attached patch should allow you to use the 16bpp mode in ARAnyM. 
video=atafb:truecolor
together with stram_pool=2048k should get you there.

fbset could be used to switch depths on the fly if you don't want to use 
it all the time.

For real existing hardware, I fear 8 bit VGA mode is the best we can do.

Cheers,

    Michael