Color Attributes

The physical attribute byte for color modes contains information on the foreground color (the color of the character itself) and the background color. The eight basic color values you can use for the foreground and background are: BLACK, BLUE, GREEN, CYAN, RED, MAGENTA, BROWN, and WHITE.

In addition, you can modify these colors by combining the value LIGHT with the basic colors using the bitwise OR operator (to get high-intensity colors). For example, specifying LIGHT | RED as the foreground parameter will provide high intensity red characters. For convenience, the color LIGHT | BROWN is #defined as YELLOW. Note that on some displays, BROWN will also show up as yellow.

The modifier BLINK can be added to the basic color values to get blinking colors. Blinking colors are only available for foreground colors. You can also modify a foreground color with both BLINK and LIGHT.

Normally, blinking and light colors are only available for foreground colors. However, if you enable high intensity background colors with a call to the video high intensity background function, vid_hibg(), you can modify the background color with light (make them high-intensity). When high intensity background colors are in use, BLINK is unavailable for foreground colors.

Thus, if high-intensity background is OFF, you have the following options when defining a logical attribute (where COLOR is one of the basic colors):

Table 46.3: Physical Attributes and Modifiers

*(foreground colors only) If high-intensity background colors are enabled with vid_hibg(), LIGHT is available for background colors and BLINK is not available for foreground colors.

If high-intensity background is ON, you have the following options (where COLOR is one of the basic colors):