I am running Mac OSX version 10.3.4 on an 800 MHz PowerPC G4.
It isn't much of a cross check, but I also installed Savitar on a Powerbook 867 MHz G4 running OSX version 10.3.4. The errors were identical.
I downloaded the latest version of Savitar from the website. (v1.3.3)
The .sit unpacked and I opened the program from inside the folder. The Program automatically starts the "World Picker" which conveniently included the game I play. Without setting any preferences or making any changes I login to materiamagica.com:4000 - using all the defaults included in the software.
The pop-up describing save settings etc. pops up... as they are want to do. I close it.
I immediately notice that the default colors for MM are not MM's default colors, that is- they are not the ansi settings found if you login through telnet without touching anything. MM is tradtionally set to be read as colored text on a black background.
http://www.materiamagica.com/start/screen/index.php <= some screenshots from their main website.
To start with whats simple, I go to the view menu>>background color>>?
The... well I can only guess what the option was.. a gradient? color pallete? couldn't be an ansi list I got way to many colors for that didn't open. But by luck I noted if you kept "background colors" highlighted and clicked out in the air where a menu should be.. the BC color would change. I won't say its random, but its pretty hard to guage clicking in the air. I never found black.
I checked all of the menus and found that both "color" and "background color" had the same mysterious action. (I duplicated this exact error on the laptop)
I also ran the error while watching the console for personal errors.. but nothing showed up.
I later used the "World Settings" to get my black background. But the ansi color sets were all slightly off the old traditionals.. so I brighten my monitor... brighten the color sets... The best result was putting them all on bold except this shifted the lines making the compass skewed.
For MM the view>>bold/underline/italic etc. options are also greyed out. Understandably now since when I used the world settings to change these things it skewed the text.
I hope this helps.