Initial Back Ground color

Hi Doc,

What you are seeing is due to the fact that ACUCOBOL-GT 16-color palette is the Windows palette and Microsoft changed the default gray.  It is a much lighter color in recent Windows.

There is no simple global way to change that for your whole application, like a configuration setting, or compile option. 

However, you can code your screens for a different color.  If you are using the AcuBench Screen Designer it is actually pretty simple.  Customize one of the standard colors to the exact color you want, then set the screen to use that color.

To start, right-click on the screen and select ‘Change Color Palette…’  Under ‘Custom Colors:’ you will see the 16 default colors. The top row on the right end is color 8 the default gray color that comes out differently on various Windows versions, and the one you get by default if you do not code a specific color.  You cannot modify this color - well you can but Windows always shows the same color regardless of what you set here.

What you can do is select some other color - say yellow (bottom row second from the right) then set Red to 210, Green to 206, and Blue to 199 (you may want to tweak those values to get closer to the old color), click ‘Add to Custom Colors’.  While you’re there set the color right above that one (color 7) to black (0 for Red, Green, and Blue).  You need to do that because when you set the screen to use that yellow color Windows uses the corresponding darker color for 3D effects.  Click ‘OK’ to exit the Color dialog.

Last thing left to do is set your screen color.  In the Screen Designer with the screen selected go to the Color property and click the little button in the Value field.  Change the Backround color to “15:Yellow” (which is now your custom color).

Go ahead and compile and run your program and you’ll see the old gray color (something close to it anyway).  Note that some elements will still have the newer lighter color - push-buttons, scroll bar buttons, combo-box dropdown buttons.  Only the push-button color can be changed - do that by setting the Background color to “15:Yellow” and adding to the Runtime configuration setting “WIN32-NATIVECTLS ON”.  Without turning on native controls the push-button will remain that lighter default color.

If you are manually coding your screens the changes are still minimal.   I’ve attached our Tour.cbl sample program with these changes already done.  Simply compile and run it with a configuration file containing “WIN32-NATIVECTLS ON” to see the effect.  Examine the code for calls to W$PALETTE to change the colors, and note the color settings for the push-button in the screen section, and for the window in the display statement.