Why is javafx mangling my semi-transparent cursors?

UPDATE: Upon deeper inspection it seems that JavaFX is not at fault – the fault seems to be in video driver implementations. Code below does work on some combinations of hardware, drivers and OSes – but not on all of them.

Unfortunately it seems that for now the best solution is to avoid cursors that have partially-transparent white or gray pixels. Partially-transparent black pixels are fine, though.

I found a way to work around the problem (tested on JDK 8 and Linux&Windows). It’s ugly and requires reflection, but seems to work. Code below (in Scala syntax, but can easily be adapted to Java):

  import com.sun.prism.PixelFormat
  import javafx.scene.ImageCursor
  import javafx.scene.image.{Image, WritableImage}

  private def undoPremultipliedAlpha(image: Image): Image = {
    // Fixes JavaFX bug with semi-transparent cursors -
    // somewhere deep in JavaFX code they premultiply alpha
    // on already premultiplied image, which screws up transparencies.
    // This method attempts to counteract it by removing premultiplied alpha
    // directly from bytes of internal JavaFX image.

    def getPlatformImage(image: Image) = image.impl_getPlatformImage()

    val platformImage = getPlatformImage(image)

    val pixelFormat = platformImage.getClass.getDeclaredMethod("getPixelFormat").invoke(platformImage).asInstanceOf[PixelFormat]
    if (pixelFormat != PixelFormat.BYTE_BGRA_PRE) {
      println(s"wrong platform image pixel format (${pixelFormat}), unable to apply cursor transparency bug workaround")
    } else {
      val pixelBufferField = platformImage.getClass.getDeclaredField("pixelBuffer")
      pixelBufferField.setAccessible(true)
      val pixelBuffer = pixelBufferField.get(platformImage).asInstanceOf[java.nio.Buffer]
      val pixelArray = pixelBuffer.array().asInstanceOf[Array[Byte]]
      for (i <- 0 until pixelArray.length / 4) {

        val alpha = (pixelArray(i * 4 + 3).toInt & 0xff) / 255.0
        if (alpha != 0) {
          pixelArray(i * 4) = math.min(255, math.max(0, ((pixelArray(i * 4).toInt & 0xff).toDouble / alpha))).toInt.toByte
          pixelArray(i * 4 + 1) = math.min(255, math.max(0, ((pixelArray(i * 4 + 1).toInt & 0xff).toDouble / alpha))).toInt.toByte
          pixelArray(i * 4 + 2) = math.min(255, math.max(0, ((pixelArray(i * 4 + 2).toInt & 0xff).toDouble / alpha))).toInt.toByte
        }
      }
    }

    image
  }

  def createImageCursor(resource: String, hotspotX: Int, hotspotY: Int): ImageCursor = {
    new ImageCursor(
      undoPremultipliedAlpha(
        new Image(resource)),
      hotspotX,
      hotspotY
    )
  }