LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

Stray Dog Joined: 02 Nov 2001 Posts: 1 Location: USA

question, for the start menu tweak, what do i need to do in order to make the image backgroun match the start button? I've tried setting it to transparent in PSP 7.04, and it hasn't worked for me... please let me know if i'm doing something wrong.

thanks guys.

CoasterCowboy

Stray Dog Joined: 08 Oct 2001 Posts: 6

Great job Issalzul Syde... cool idea. I was thinking about doing an ascii pron version myself.

tre start button image transparency is 255,0,255

Stray Dog Joined: 14 Oct 2001 Posts: 4 Location: Canada

That little black square you see plastic is because in the Windows XP OPK (OEM Preinstallation Kit), there is the ability for corporate users to add to the boot logo their company logo. This is somewhat of a nussiance and no one even uses that I know of yet.

Posted: Sun Nov 04, 2001 9:57 am Post subject:

Hey, thanks Daisuke, I was thinking I made some stupid mistake. Any idea on how to fill it ?

Stray Dog Joined: 15 Nov 2001 Posts: 4 Location: USA

Thanks for all of the great information. I have been trying to play around with these boot screens in both Win2k and XP, and I am SOOOOO glad that someone figured out how to turn off the "Professional" overlay in XP.

Two questions though....

1. I am not in anyway an imaging application user, so I pulled an XP boot screen off of a website that was in .jpeg format. I used irfview to change it to a 16 COLOR .bmp file. Then I placed it in the bitmap #1 location of NTOSCHK.exe and replaced the bitmap #10 with a 1 x 1 .bmp pic. I edited the boot.ini and all works fine, except that when I reboot, I see my new boot screen for a fraction of a second and then a REALLY CRAPPY version shows up! I kind of understood what Ishmael said about changing the pallets and all, but this should not be affecting this since I am replacing the file right? Is there another file that I need to be replacing as well? (Yes the file is in the proper format...I spent all day reading through the 81 pages about Win2K, so you can be sure that I was very careful that it was in the right format!)

2. I have been playing around with this in .NET server, do you know which bitmap is the one that I can replace to get rid of the ".NET Server Family"? Maybe bitmap #11?

I appreciate all of the helpful info that eveyone has given me!

Stray Dog Joined: 15 Nov 2001 Posts: 4 Location: USA

One other questions...this one is in regards to the "start" menu.

I am able to change the wording in the start menu in XP Pro, but when I tried to do it in .NET Server, it kept comming up with the original word "Start".

I have checked, rechecked, and rechecked again, and according to winhex and reshacker, it should read "Hello"(just what I was using for practice).

I am 100% positive that SFC has not restored the explorer.exe file in c:\windows\ . I have not only tried renaming the file from safemode w/ command prompt, but I have also tried to do it from dos, and in the registry as stated earlier in the post. Everytime, I check and explorer.exe has been replaced with my hacked version, but it still reads "Start".

I am just wondering if the shell that is in use (not the "Luna" shell that is standard on XP Pro) has these settings in a different place?

Anyone have any ideas?

Stray Dog Joined: 14 Aug 2001 Posts: 42 Location: USA

Cougar:

The boot screen for windows XP uses a MS pallete. No matter what you use for the BMP it is going to use the one built into the kernel. No one that I have found out has been able to get around this. Thats the biggest problem so far. The reason you see it for a flash is cuz it displays the BMP then kicks in its own pallete. Cycles it from black to what you see.

Maybe some one will figure out a way to get rid of the the pallete switch. untill then good luck making one using MS. I have just an outline drawing of Calvin and Hobbes for mine.

-Apuleus

Stray Dog Joined: 14 Oct 2001 Posts: 4 Location: Canada

i wish MS would let us desgin our own boot logos at any color depth we want, as long as the windows XP logo and MS logo was there .... maybe they should come out with an app that does that, and it will allow shrinking/expandinding of the logos (vector based) so that no one would be able to remove those, but have it so that they could only be resized so far ..... this would really generate more interest in XP

Posted: Sat Nov 24, 2001 4:48 am Post subject:

Quote:

i wish MS would let us desgin our own boot logos at any color depth we want

If you can work out how to load video drivers before the boot logo then you can have a logo at any colour depth you want.

My £0.02,
Demon
---=== ===---
The c@ s@ on the m@.

Stray Dog Joined: 15 Nov 2001 Posts: 4 Location: USA

I have finally figured out what Ishmael was talking about with the 16.pal pallet.

If you want some good step by step instructions on how to create and save Xp boot screens, I found some at:

http://www.ibelite.com/articl.php?action=showcontent&sid=6&comments=6

I had some issues though when using these directions explicitly. The problem that I was seeing was that I downloaded some XP boot screens from http://www.getskinned.org/index.shtml and when I unzipped them they would provide me with an ntoskrnl.exe and a .bmp. If I used the .bmp with the steps on the page above, the resolution was really crappy. If I used their ntoskrnl.exe, I was unable to reboot.

The work around I found was to use resource hacker to open the downloaded ntoskrnl.exe and save the .bmp under bitmaps->1 to a specified location. Then I would open the ntoschk.exe that my boot.ini (kernel=ntoschk.exe) was using and replace the .bmp with the one that I saved to the specified location. The final step was to use photo shop to change bitmap 10 (Windows Professional banner) to a 1 x 1 bmp.

Now everything works fine.

http://www.getskinned.org/index.shtml also has some cool themes for XP.

Posted: Fri Dec 21, 2001 5:47 pm Post subject:

Demon:

It probably wouldn't be that difficult to do so, all you need is to load the vesa 2.0 drivers, which are compatible with all videocards. It can't do much (like 3d accel), but if you remember all those dos games ran in hi-res with only UniVBE, which was 200k. An example of this is a linux boot screen, which can be viewed in any resolution and colour depth.
Only a dream though.

Richard Malone

Stray Dog Joined: 23 Dec 2001 Posts: 4 Location: USA

Quote:

replacing WinXP's boot logo is not very desirable, however easy it may be.

How untrue =P
These are just a few images I made into a boot logo. Both work just fine and look great!

Easiest way I found to do this was take an image and reduce to 2 colors in PSP w/ error diffusion. Then Increase to 16 colors & fix palletes and stuff.

Feel free to use these if anyone wants.

-Nilbus

Edited by - nilbus on 12/27/2001 01:53:18

Stray Dog Joined: 21 Jan 2002 Posts: 4

ok, i've tried reading all the info up here for changing the XP professional boot screen. TOTALLY confusing!!!! ANyways, i have WinXp Prof. Corporate and i have photshop6 as well. What i'd like to know is how would i get a nice high quality pic to be useful as a bootup screen and the steps neede to chamge the screen. Thanks.

Stray Dog Joined: 23 Dec 2001 Posts: 4 Location: USA

Look on Page 1 of this thread under the post:
HOW TO CORRECTLY CHANGE XP BOOT IMAGE by Ishmael.
That's what I went by, and it was pretty easy.
He was right though.. you do need Paint Shop Pro to do it. Photoshop won't work because of the palette thing. Also, you can't have a good high quality picture because of the the 16 color palette it's forced onto.

Good luck
-Nilbus

Quote:

ok, i've tried reading all the info up here for changing the XP professional boot screen. TOTALLY confusing!!!! ANyways, i have WinXp Prof. Corporate and i have photshop6 as well. What i'd like to know is how would i get a nice high quality pic to be useful as a bootup screen and the steps neede to chamge the screen. Thanks.

Stray Dog Joined: 07 Oct 2001 Posts: 4

Logon screen blue flash.

My logon is set up as follws:

A wallpaper bitmap is loaded in through HKEY_USERS/.DEAFAULT/Control Panel/Desktop/Wallpaper
The rest of the logon screens is tailorized in the logonui.exe bitmaps and UIFILE.

During startup the wallpaper bitmap loads and stays for a few seconds then comes a flash of a blue screen before the
login screens are started.

Does anybody know how to change the color of this screen or even better get rid of it completely?

Appreciate any hints.

pierre