I got the official Windows binary from
nethack.org and am running the game
in tty (non-curses) mode. But closed
doors are black and can not be seen
with a black background. Any way to
change this? I have tried all of the
settings for a Windows command prompt,
but I still get the black doors.

For some reason NetHack.exe remembers old color
choices that I made in the properties menu of cmd.exe.
At one point I changed the foreground color to red and
have since changed it back to white. When in the command
prompt the text I enter and read is white, but when I
run NetHack.exe the text is red and the doors are
colored purple. So there is some setting somewhere
that is remembering old color values. I keep changing
the terminal colors but can not get it to stick. NetHack.exe
just remembers one set of colors and I do not know how
to over-ride it.

Any help?

On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 1:36:59 PM UTC-7, Patrick Clot wrote:
> For some reason NetHack.exe remembers old color
> choices that I made in the properties menu of cmd.exe.

If you're using a desktop shortcut to start nethack, it has
it's own set of properties. NetHack won't know or care
about them but the window it's running in will.

Have you tried toggling the 'use_darkgray' option on or
off (opposite of whatever it is now)? I'm not sure how it
is supposed to work but I'm fairly sure that it offers some
control for rendering of black on the map.

On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 7:10:33 PM UTC-5, Pat Rankin wrote:
> On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 1:36:59 PM UTC-7, Patrick Clot wrote:
> > For some reason NetHack.exe remembers old color
> > choices that I made in the properties menu of cmd.exe.
> If you're using a desktop shortcut to start nethack, it has
> it's own set of properties. NetHack won't know or care
> about them but the window it's running in will.
I changed the colors to be white on black in the window
that is created by running NetHack.exe from the Windows
Explorer (not the command prompt). Now the game
text is white on black and the doors are the correct
brown color, but all white objects are dark blue.
If I run Nethack.exe from the command line and
not through windows explorer, the text is red
on black and the doors are purple.

> Have you tried toggling the 'use_darkgray' option on or
> off (opposite of whatever it is now)? I'm not sure how it
> is supposed to work but I'm fairly sure that it offers some
> control for rendering of black on the map.
I tried use_darkgray but without noticeable effect since
doors are now purple.

It is like there is some cached information living
somewhere that is not being updated. I tried searching
for "Command Processor" in the registry but I did not
see a color key/value.

On 29.06.2021 02:36, Patrick Clot wrote:
> On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 7:10:33 PM UTC-5, Pat Rankin wrote:
>> On Monday, June 28, 2021 at 1:36:59 PM UTC-7, Patrick Clot wrote:
>>> For some reason NetHack.exe remembers old color
>>> choices that I made in the properties menu of cmd.exe.
>
> It is like there is some cached information living
> somewhere that is not being updated. I tried searching
> for "Command Processor" in the registry but I did not
> see a color key/value.

Have you considered running it from a Unix environment? Cygwin is
a lot of stuff to be installed but maybe it's easier to run it as
configured from that sub-system context.

Janis

> Have you considered running it from a Unix environment? Cygwin is
> a lot of stuff to be installed but maybe it's easier to run it as
> configured from that sub-system context.

That is a reasonable idea. In the meantime, I have just been
running NetHackW.exe (rather than NetHack.exe) and pressing
F5 to get my beloved ASCII Graphics map.

I found a fix for this. There is a program
called colortool that has color schemes
that you can install from cmd.exe. Here
is a link on how to configure and run
colortool: (I used the campbell.ini scheme
to restore the correct colors):

https://www.howtogeek.com/322432/how-to-customize-your-command-prompts-color-scheme-with-microsofts-colortool/

Just google for the github location where colortool lives.

Cheers,
pmc