changing the color of displayed messages

I don't know of any way to do this. You can embed escape sequences in your $display statements that would change the color of the text printed to your terminal window. Many (most?) Xterm windows support the VT100 protocol to some extent way down underneath. So the VT100 escape sequences work on my Linux box to change the terminal output color.

But I don't think that the ncsim console wndow is anything but a text pane and as far as I know they've not exposed any API that would let you change the text characteristics.

That works fine for batch mode, but not for GUI. As you presumed.

I was wondering if cadence had some API for that. 

Thanks.

We've had a couple of requests for this, but at the moment there's no API for colouring messages in the SimVision console window.

You could probably make a plug-in script for SimVision to do it, as the plug-in API is pretty good and usable. I know that we have a plug-in that lets you hyperlink messages in the log based on identifying things like timestamps for example. Contact me if you want some more info on that (or take a look in the SimVision docs book "SimVision Command Language Reference" section "Writing Plug-In Applications".

You can also file a service request at http://support.cadence.com/ if you want to make a formal enhancement request (I would recommend that, because unless R&D get enough justification, they cannot allocate time to develop features like this).