One of the silly limitations it had as a result of this neglect was that it was impossible to run cmd.exe with an arbitrary set of foreground and background col

One of the silly limitations it had as a result of this neglect was that it was impossible to run cmd.exe with an arbitrary set of foreground and background colors because it was limited to using a set of 7 unique color schemes stored in the registry. I used to (like 15 years ago) have a hack script for this called colorcmd that would take the fg and bg color hex as arguments. The dirty trick was that the registry keys for the color sets were named for the actual executable that was being run, and I would just make a symlink to cmd.exe called eg colorcmd_RRGGBB_RRGGBB.exe (with the actual rgb hex), create the registry entries for it, then run that exe. Now it seems odd to me to even want many different colors of console (I used to use them for differentiating purpose or project) but that was a fun little workaround at the time.