Strictly from memory, way back: IIRC the only way one could change the background color on SDT was to muck with the table stored in the graphics card. But having anything other than black was frowned upon by Orcadians back then, right up there with parking a Harley next to a Goldwing ;-)
I don't know if this is still possible in a DOS window.
There was nothing when executed with "Orcad.exe -c"? That should bring up the config menu selections, but I do not know if that is where it is at either.
Anyway, the color table does not allow the Bkgd to be changed. It is hard coded. I suppose it is possible to modify a driver if one knew how they were compiled, which we do not. What is wrong with black?
My favorite console color scheme in Linux is Green on Black. :-)
Hell, all we need is a decent set of VESA drivers. I have trouble even getting any of my 800x600 drivers working on any of these newer cards, so even VGA must be "in a different place" in the card's set-up. VESA modes always seem to work these days. So they need a vesa driver set.
Tango PCB has one. Pretty nice too. I run both that and Orcad from within DOSBox, which does allow full screen sessions, even in Windows 7. Any hardware hooks that are needed (even local machine stuff) can be attached to via NET USE type commands if direct methods pose problems.
In the olden days we loaded our own color tables so you could change almost any color that a program would generate. But you had to know the inner workings of your video card. And there were some that required caution, if you wrote to the wrong registers you could kill the card ...
Let me guess, "AwlSome Auger" is another nym of dipshit AlwaysWrong?
As I remember Gendrive, you ran it pulling in data from the provided driver for your card, VGA in my case, then you could twiddle the color tables and export as your own custom driver... JET.DRV in my case.
(I can't run it now, but I'll send this archive to JF and see if he can use it.)
PKZIP (tm) FAST! Create/Update Utility Version 1.02 10-01-89 Copyright 1989 PKWARE Inc. All Rights Reserved. PKZIP/h for help
Don't remember that.. but do remember that some CRT monitors would die if fed the wrong horiz/vert frequencies (which some cards were quite capable of producing).
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Yes, that's how it's done. I never killed a graphics card with it but in the old days it was possible with some of them to drive them into a bus contention situation. Then it would sit there and some chip would become toasty, hot, hotter, really hot ...
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