Coloring your server name! (and console text too)

[amperbee]

Rapidgame7 submitted a new resource:

Coloring console text! - Or "how to pretend to be cool" by adding it everywhere

I'm at least 40% sure that when you first tried to figure out how to get a colored title for your server, you found this 2011 post (among other results but this was the first one).

I thought it would be better to go slightly more in-depth, update it to recent versions and mention other uses.

Let's start with this from the get-go: You cannot color your player name, nor chat text (yourself). If it was possible in older versions, good...

Read more about this resource...

 

[t0astrboy]

Wow, I'm surprised how actually straightforward and follow-able this is. It's like one of those tutorial videos that actually give the proper step-by-step help you need.

My question is how you got the giant Sonicy text, unless it's a glorified transparent png.

 

[amperbee]

how you got the giant Sonicy text, unless it's a glorified transparent png.

It's a transparent png. I don't think it's "glorified" since it's actually one lol

 

[KevTSP]

For some reason when I try to execute the file in SRB2, it keeps telling me it could not execute it, and believe I followed the tutorial correctly
Nevermind I didn't know you had to type the file type after the name of the file

 

[Papyrus The Royal Guard]

This Happens when i try to exec the file

 

[Saturn Ross]

It seems the pastebin you linked for the ASCII symbols is down. A few friends and I all tried to access it and all of us got a blank page, so it's not just my own internet.

Also, would it be possible to see an update to this for Ring Racers? The chat colours don't actually line up in RR, with several colours being different (IIRC notably, rosy & brown swapped) and numerous ASCII symbols all redirect to different button prompts and not colours. It'd be neat to know what symbols produce what buttons as well as the colours, as it may have some use cases!

 

[amperbee]

It seems the pastebin you linked for the ASCII symbols is down.

I'm not logged in, and I can access it. Pastebin may have had a brain fart that day.

Also, would it be possible to see an update to this for Ring Racers?

Sadly, I'm lazy. and rather busy. i might be able to get to it someday tho
You can still use the same grid of symbols, paste them to a text file, prepend echo to each line and execute the file as a console script to see how the grid would look like in your console and get an idea.

 

[amperbee]

LOL NEVERMIND turns out adding it was easy. Figured I could update the rest as well, so I did.

+ added an image for DRRR colors
+ replaced the pastebin link in favor of just pasting the color codes in the board. BE CAREFUL: USE ANSI FORMAT
+ replaced imgur hotlinked images with images uploaded directly to the post
@ rewrote some text
@ changed a few examples to reflect my 2025 humor

Download update here...

Check it out!

Post automatically merged: Mar 20, 2025

holy triple post

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numerous ASCII symbols all redirect to different button prompts and not colours.

I don't play DRRR often, so my knowledge of it is pretty low. Button prompts are pretty much outside the scope for a "how to color your server title" guide, but I figured that hey, they're replacing transparency, might as well check it out.

The console font itself has a few bonus characters: Between hex 1A and 1D you can find arrows, 1E has ᶏ and 1F has ú. Font-wise, there doesn't seem to be anything new.
Code-wise though, when a character is drawn to the screen, it does the standard colormap thing: It checks if a bit is set, and does the thing.
This seems to have some sort of bug though, because some color symbols just... don't work properly? In console it is reflected as expected, but in the UI some symbols (the ones with the lower 4 bits being 1, 8, D or F) use an incorrect colormap. It seems to match the previous colormap, like how D acts like C, or 1 acts like 0. No clue what's up with this though, this problem isn't present in SRB2.

It might be fixed in a future update. Caret colors still work fine.

If that check doesn't pass because other bits are on, and after a few other checks, the game uses the symbol as a button graphic indicator.
On a character byte, the lower 4 bits indicate what button it is, and the upper 4 indicate what state it should show in (down, up, alternating).

Lower bits Represents button 0x00 Arrow Up 0x01 Arrow Down 0x02 Arrow Right 0x03 Arrow Left 0x04 D-Pad 0x07 Shoulder R 0x08 Shoulder L 0x09 Start 0x0A A 0x0B B 0x0C C 0x0D D 0x0E E 0x0F F

Upper bits Represents state 0x90 Down/Pressed (buggy) 0xA0 Alternating 0xB0 Up/Released 0xC0 Down/Pressed

For some reason, 0x90 doesn't show some of the graphics, and I don't know if it's part of the same bug as above.

I could add it to the guide once I can clean this into something more readable... But I'd need to think up of a better guide name If I do, lol