Unable to get "bright" colours in vmware

[Craze Frog]

I can't get the "bright" console colours (8-F) to work in vmware, when I use them as background colours. When I use them as foreground colours everything works fine.

This gives me bright green on green:

Code: Select all

mov byte [$b8000+1], $2A

While this gives me green on green:

Code: Select all

mov byte [$b8000+3], $A2

What's up?

[CodeCat]

The last bit in a colour does not necessarily make the colour bright if it's used as a background. There are some VGA settings that control its actual use, but I think by default it makes the text blinking rather than the background bright.

[Craze Frog]

Oh, but it doesn't blink either.

[Love4Boobies]

What do you mean? It's doing exactly what you told it... And it is blinking... it's just blinking green on green...

[Craze Frog]

When I say it's not blinking, I mean it's not blinking. So if I use $A0 I get black on dark green, and with $20 I get exactly the same. No blinking.

[Combuster]

I think it has to do with the fact that emulating a VGA environment with blinking enabled is relatively slow since it requires you to draw things over and over. That and VMs/emulators tend to have slightly broken VGA suppport.

You can have a look at AC register 0x10 - blinking can be enabled and disabled and it might just be off by default.

[Love4Boobies]

No - even in emulators, it's on by default. Look at the colors. It's a blinking green foreground over a green background. That's why you can't see the blinking...

[Craze Frog]

No - even in emulators, it's on by default. Look at the colors. It's a blinking green foreground over a green background. That's why you can't see the blinking...

I just told you that even if I set the foreground to black and the background to bright green, I get a foreground of black and background of dark green without blinking. It's not green on green, it's black on green, and it's not blinking.

[Love4Boobies]

Maybe it's just the emulator itself. For instance, I know that on Windows older than Vista (haven't tried on either Vista or 7) blinking doesn't work in the console, unless in fullscreen mode. QEMU's support for text mode stinks. Maybe it's Virtual PC to blame... Try writing some dummy code on a floppy disk and booting with it, to check if your blinking code works.

[Brendan]

Hi,

The last bit in a colour does not necessarily make the colour bright if it's used as a background. There are some VGA settings that control its actual use, but I think by default it makes the text blinking rather than the background bright.

Yes.

Try "Int 0x10, AX=0x1003" and see if you can enable background intensity.

I wouldn't worry about blinking - if it does work it's ugly anyway.


Cheers,

Brendan