Detecting Colour and Monochrome Monitors
Detecting if you have a colour or monochrome video card is trivial. You can use the values stored in the BIOS data segment to determine this.
Here is some C source example of how I do it.
/* video card mono/colour detection by Dark Fiber * returns 0=mono, 1=colour */ int detect_video_type(void) { int rc; char c=(*(volatile USHORT*)0x410)&0x30; /* C can be 0x00 or 0x20 for colour, 0x30 for mono if(c==0x30){ rc=0; // mono } else { rc=1; // colour } return rc; }