The black on yellow background is highly visible for me on my system too, irad d. Thank you very much!

Wow--that looks really great in your screen capture, irad d! I can easily read the EmComm callsign. Thanks so much for your prompt attention! Email sent. 73, Cal -- AD8Q

Thanks for the above notes, which I guess I previously missed, Irad d, and thanks for inventing and implementing Linux Compatibility Mode. Stability is more important than the features you disabled. In all my years of using WINE and Linux (clear back to the early Slackware days) I don't recall any other developer supporting such a mode. 73, Cal -- AD8Q

Thanks for your reply, Randy. Yes--I've tried that. However, by the time I increase the font size to make the callsigns as readable as they were before this emcomm colorization "feature" (hardship for me) was imposed, I lose a lot of information. (Not nearly as many callsigns fit in the box). Accordingly, I must scroll through the callsigns to access the same amount of information I had at a glance in previous versions of VarAC. Given the efforts made to support appearance customization in VarAC, forcing the new emcomm appearance attributes on uses seems like a huge step in the wrong direction! If I could even change the red emcomm background color to a different color of my choosing, the problem would be significantly mitigated. (Perhaps a yellow background or maybe simply changing the character color to black--I would need to experiment to optimize my selection). Furthermore, it seems that any user can become an emcomm station simply by selecting their wish from the pulldown menu. Such a deception is unlikely to garner a QSO with me, because I would no longer be able to easily read their callsign, but this tactic might appeal to some users. Enabling this fraudulent behavior seems like a mistake to me too. I emphatically request the ability to either disable this feature or at least permit users to select character and background colors of their own choosing that still earmark the emcomm stations. Geesh--a new 1-minute timer was wisely added in this release to mitigate potential Vmail spamming. If such a worry is warranted by the VarAC devs, I would think enabling the potential for emcomm station posers would be a concern too. I sincerely hope that Irad reads my comments here. 73, Cal -- AD8Q

Thank you for your reply irad d! Is it possible that narration functioned when I first installed VarAC under WINE but before I enabled inux-compatible-mode (checking the box)? I definitely remember it working at first.

I'd like to update my reply and happily now report that most of my crashes seem to be "off-Windows" WINE related. It seems the crashes, accompanied by "serious error/VarAC needs to close messages", are most likely to occur when I use a VarAC feature that that has a behavior outside of the WINE box/environment. For example, if I attempt to access PskReporter or QRZ via the buttons within the VarAC program that launch Firefox under MX-Linux on my system, a crash is more likely. The solution, or at least my mitigation, is to launch Firefox and access the desired websites manually and outside of VarAC. Crashes are occurring much less frequently since I learned to avoid using features that don't stay in the WINE sandbox! VarAC is now no less stable than JS8Call for me, which also crashes occasionally on all my platforms ranging from arm64 Pi 4 and arm64 Quadra and Pinebook Pro to AMD/Intel x86-64 laptops running Linux distros. BTW, I have no reason to believe any of my infrequent crashes are due to HF in the shack. I am careful to use common mode coax filters and the crashes don't seem to correlate with operating power levels (QRP to near-full legal limit) or any particular band, antenna or operations. fldigi, wsjt-x and various pat Winlink operations (ardopc, direwolf AGWPE, NucleoTNC ax25, Vara FM) are very stable. JS8Call (Linux binaries) and VarAC under WINE--just a bit less so. Again, thank you so much for your significant contribution to ham radio, Irad. VarAC is really fun! 73, Cal -- AD8Q

I just got Vara, VaraFM, and VarAC running on my Dell Intel x86-64 based Dell laptop under WINE. Like many similar Windows programs, I experienced quite a long thrash ("time investment") to get it running. I've run the modems with pat Winlink and now Vara (HF) with VarAC. The VarAC features and performance are impressive. Unfortunately, I've experienced three "serious error/VarAC needs to close") errors since I got it running today. Stability under WINE and library bugs/incompatibilities when are common. Ever run EZ-NEC under WINE? It doesn't crash like VarAC but the math libraries really mess-up the mantissa of the output values. Thanks for your huge contribution to ham radio irad d, but I don't run anything but income tax software under Windows (and I hate having to do even that). Unless I can find some effective tips on improving the stability under WINE, I probably won't be around here for long. :( 73, Cal -- AD8Q