Why I only get 8 colors out of ncurses?

I'm coding in Gentoo Linux, using ncurses and testing my applications using the GNOME terminal.

I have no problems using colors, but I only get 8 and it would be nice to have a few more... I know the GNOME terminal has support for a 16 color palette, but I don't know how can I use them all with ncurses. Well, I know way...

It's like this, I have 7 color pairs for the colors: red, blue, yellow, green, cyan, magenta and white with black background. If I use this colors with the attribute A_BOLD (to make the text bold) I don't only get the text in bold but the colors of the text will be the other 7 colors defined in the GNOME palette.

My question is, how can I use this other 7 (or 8 if you count black) colors without having to bold the text?

I'm not entirely familiar with how terminals work in Linux as opposed to Windows, but those other 8 colors should just be a lighter/darker variant of the first 8. I guess that A_BOLD is just a fancy name for toggling the use of darker and lighter colors.

I'd read this: http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man3/curs_color.3.asp

But using the A_BOLD thing, actually turns the letters bold... Yes, they are a bit lighter with the same color but they also are bold and I don't want that.

I'm gonna take a look at that...