How do I...

[face_master]

How do I change the colour of my text in a DOS program (or is this possible...?)

Thanks
-Chris

[Procyon]

It depends on your compiler. My DOS compiler, Borland 3.1, has a special cprintf() function that prints in color if you set it beforehand with textcolor() and textbackground(). I don't know how you'd do it with cout, though.

[face_master]

Does anybody know how to do this with cout?

[Witch_King]

What compiler do you have? If the answer is VC++6, than you can't do it without building a Win32 MFC or ATL project. DOS is mostly unsupported now a days, infact you have to work in a Win32 console in VC++6.

[face_master]

I have Dev C++ and Rhide (I can use both)

[doubleanti]

well, i've unfortunately had the experience that Dev-C++ doesn't allow interrupts... (unless someone found out... but i'm pretty sure that question is dead...) so, i never did end up switching from DJGPP to Dev-C++... (because i really liked the editor...) if you can find ways to access conventional memory using Dev-C++, i believe the address for the text is 0xb800:0000... and with DJGPP use int 10h... (a good resource for interrupts is Ralph Browns Interrupt List... by the way...)

hth...

[Stoned_Coder]

There are lots of defined constants in windows.h. For text colour and background colour the ones we are interested in are:-
FOREGROUND_RED
FOREGROUND_GREEN
FOREGROUND_BLUE
FOREGROUND_INTENSITY
BACKGROUND_RED
BACKGROUND_GREEN
BACKGROUND_BLUE
BACKGROUND_INTENSITY

first you need to get the output handle for the console.Use GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE)
for actually setting the colour we use SetConsoleTextAttribute(hConsole,DWORD colour)

so to put it all together for instance to make red text on a bright blue background we can say:-
SetConsoleTextAttribute(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HA NDLE),FOREGROUND_RED|BACKGROUND_BLUE|BACKGROUND_IN TENSITY);

[Hannwaas]

Actually for some reason it works with cout << if you use clrscr() first (at least with borland command line, don't know with dev-cpp).

[Flikm]

its all great but are there really only 3 colors?

[Stoned_Coder]

Not quite.... you can get 16 colours....

All you do is 'or' the different constants together.... i.e.

FOREGROUND_RED|FOREGROUND_GREEN should give you yellow etc.
if you want a brighter colour or in FOREGROUND_INTENSITY etc.

play around with them... by using different combinations of the constants you can get 16 different colours.