QEMU in curses mode from an OS X machine.
I’d just like to mention that when you use QEMU from a Macintosh running OS X, using the regular Terminal.app terminal, the terminal type will be listed as xterm-256. This will make your monitor console be black on black no mater what you do, except that making the background transparent will make the text somewhat visible.
The “solution” is to change your terminal type to regular old xterm. I’m doing something likes this on my QEMU commands…
$ TERM=xterm qemu-system-i386 ...the-rest-of-my-arguments…