Good utility. But what if I don't want to overwrite the palette, but want to just change the color of the text and background in DOSBox just like in Command Prompt with the color command?
So other programs will appear the way they're supposed to just the DOSBox prompt will have different color.

So like color 5e would show yellow on purple

That can be done with ANSI escape codes, like in MS-DOS with ansi.sys loaded.

Sorry for necroposting this thread.
But once upon a time I took CHGCOLOR here and tried to improve it with concentration on CGA games.
There are some videos with the results.
1) Monuments of mars (there's no return back to cga default colors after mode switch (try CHGCOLOR and see what I mean), manual palette switch is shown)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyXxpoJRmWc

2) Popcorn (slowdown/acceleration, manual palette switch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjvgAEPJqgQ

3) Alley cat (auto/manual palette switch also)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKNkKj-twxE

I'm not any good at programming DOS TSRs. But what do you think?

4-greytones would be nice.

theshich wrote on 2021-03-14, 20:36:

2) Popcorn (slowdown/acceleration, manual palette switch)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjvgAEPJqgQ

Funny that you mention Popcorn.. 🙂👍
I've used it for testing purposes a while ago..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu88uKmqlEU

Popcorn uses an alternate palette already (red vs pink).

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-03-14, 20:50:

4-greytones would be nice.

🤣

Yeah, sometimes our eyes hurt so much we'd wish CGA had no colour..

With a real CGA and a video monitor (mono or PAL) it's easy to get rid of colour..

Or just use a VGA adapter that grounds pin 12 (mono monitor sense), so the VGA card goes monochrome.

Or use this: https://hackaday.io/project/166041-monochromevga

(Makes me wonder if that works with SCART, too. Take CVBS/VBS video and feed it into both
Green and Composite Sync, use a 3v coin cell to activate RGB Sense pin.. )

Edit: It's possible to turn any CRT TV/CRT video monitor in a monochrome display.
It's possible to manually adjust the potis for R/G/B on the driver board.
The colours not wanted can simply be turned down.
That's better than for the circuits than cutting off the R/B tube terminals if you want a green monitor.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2021-03-14, 20:50:

4-greytones would be nice.

64 EGA color palette contains black, white and two greys. So it's not a problem with original CHGCOLOR.
Or I can fine tune more than fifty shades of grey for you because I use 18bit color.

There are some CGA games - such as BurgerTime, PopCorn and Grand Prix Circuit in CGA mode, - that just ignore the palette changes made by this utility (there is a routine that's supposed to suppress that, but it only works with EGA- and certain CGA titles for some reason) on VGA cards, but I've fixed it so that they don't 😀 Very handy for PCI & AGP cards that do not emulate CGA color palettes properly (which is 99,9% of them).
There is now a glitch that breaks DOS Navigator's graphics (possibly others), but it works wonderfully otherwise: just use the command line in pure DOS, or restart the PC between sessions.

I've also included a little batch file menu for loading the standard CGA palettes:

In all other aspects it works exactly the same as the original version of CHGCOLOR.

That's nice, thanks 😀
I was just wondering how to get palette 5 in CGA games, like some people somehow get it on their old PCs. https://computeremuzone.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=150043