I had to fool with this in college, but don't you set the attribs on a char by char basis, writing to either the odd byte or odd nibble of the video text segment?

Rock

No, that is used to set the background+forground colors.

I always remember blink being the top bit of the odd byte in the video display, hence there being more colors for foreground then background.. background uses 3 bits, foreground 4, and blink = 1.

or is it 1 for inverse?

Yup, you hit it on the head. The high bit is the blink bit, 3 bit background color, and 4 foreground. I don't think the color modes support inverse (not on a char by char basis anyway). That may be an attrib in mono modes (never used it).

Rock

[This message has been edited by Rock2000 (edited September 23, 1999).]

Yes you can set the back and foreground colors with the odd byte. With blink on you have 8 background colors (the other ones activate blink). But there is a way to set the videocard attributes to turn blink off.
This way you can have 16 background colors.

Use fn INT 10H 1003H
bl=1 (enable blinking, 8bk colors)
bl=0 (disable blinking, 16bk colors)

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FlyFire/CodeX
http://codexorg.webjump.com

That's the better way.
I couldn't find it, still using an old program with info on interrupts, I/O ports etc. (Maybe you've heard of it, techhelp).

Anyone knows a better (newer) program of the same kind?

Back to good ol' textmode .
I'm writing a I/O library for a schoolmate (in Borland C++ 5.0).
Now I've stumbled upon this error:
When setting the blink attribute to ZERO (off) the screen turns black. Writing to the video segment won't help. This is my code:

asm{
mov dx, 0x3DA
in al, dx
mov dx, 0x3C0
mov al, 0x10
out dx, al
mov al, 4
out dx, al
};

Hope anybody can help me out.

I have TechHelp! database v6.0
there was that info...

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FlyFire/CodeX
http://codexorg.webjump.com