Yes, unfortunately a known bug in high color modes 🙁

Googling around I only saw mentions of color problems in fullscreen, while I have the same problem in window mode as well - does my description fit the bug you are talking about?
If so, I shouldn't hold my breath about it being fixed, should I? 😉

Edit: Agh, I found your post from 2010! I guess I should forget about DOSBox on OS X!

Dominus wrote:

btw. just thought of it, are you on OS X? Then forget it. Right now there is a bug that prevents correct colors in very high color depths in Dosbox on OS X 🙁

Yeah, most games are fine, maybe a wrong colored movie scene. Along with GTA it seems that these two are bad ;(

Has any attempt been made to debug it on the mac platform? Looking at the screenshot, it appears red and green are swapped, blue is absent or strongly attenuated. I suppose that could happen when ARGB has reversed byte order (BGRA)... and endianness is, of course, the most likely suspect.

There was some small effort. Will need to look it up. But it's really annoying and only with high color modes (I made some Windows 3.x screenshots a while ago and had posted them in the development forum)

Maybe you're referring to this thread: GTA colours display incorrectly in fullscreen

What is the issue's current status? I gather the wrong colors are associated with 15, 16, and 32 bit color modes, but there seems to be some uncertainty about fullscreen or windowed. Then there's the latest version of SDL 1.2 that allegedly fixes the problem, or maybe not...

That's just another symptom but there was more discussion. I need to find time to search. There is/was also a patch on the sourceforge tracker (either in bugs or patches).

found it 😀
many more details at https://sourceforge.net/p/dosbox/bugs/347/