This is the Shareware Release Version of my Animated Logo Utility. Please note that this program is shareware, for registration information see the about tab in the program or the Register.txt file. The only file required to run this version on a Windows 95, 98 or ME Machine is XRXLOGO.EXE If you have any problems with it, let me know (Email : xrx@nucleus.com) The purpose of this utility is to set the correct bits in a 320 x 400 x 256 Color Bitmap to an Animated Windows ME/98/95 Startup Logo, and display the resulting animation. The palette modification routines have been corrected (moving colors more than one place caused the image to change.) This has been fixed. The logo validation routine has been totaly rewritten, you can now read RLE encoded files for both mask and normal logos. Decodes an RLE input file to full RGB size in memory, and saves valid RGB format files. Error messages on file loading now a bit more informative (only gives first error found, but that should be enough) Will now handle BMP's that are short of full size, or do not include all 256 colors in their palette, if the image is 8bit but the palette is short, the palette will be expanded to 256 colors, if the image is short, it will be padded out with the background color. A side effect of these updates is that masks can be stored as (much smaller) RLE encoded files and still be used, the actual logos must be RGB, because RLE encoded files are not recognised at boot time. New in the previous release is the ability to use a 'logo mask' to add animation to an image. There are two type of masks, the first is any animated logo. When this type of mask is used, all animated elements are copied from the mask logo into the current logo. The user must be sure that the palette entries that are animated in the mask are not used in the target logo. The second type of mask allows both animated and non animated elements to be added, for this to work, all of the palette entries used in the mask must be unused in the target logo, and they must be at the end of the palette in the mask, all the entries at the beginning of the mask MUST be black (Red 0, Green 0, Blue 0) examine the included MASK.SYS for an example. In order to use the MASK.SYS, your image must be 320 x 400 256 colors, and the last 25 colors in the palette must be unused. The following is slightly modified instructions from my World Wide Web page on how to create Animated Logo Screens. Including a quick overview of how to use XrXLogo. The page can be found at: html://www.nucleus.com/~kmcmurdo/win95logo.html Karl McMurdo ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Animated Logo Screens As many people are no doubt aware, anyone can replace the startup logo screen shown by Windows 95® with one of their own, the only problem has been that it isn't widely known how to create an animated startup screen (Those pretty moving blue bars at the bottom of the standard screen.) While some people may not feel this is important, and many simply disable the logo screen completely, with my extremely unstable system (Strange Hardware), it is important to me to know the that the system is still doing something rather than just sitting there during startup. Until now this has left me STUCK with the default startup logo which has bothered me because I KNOW I'm running Windows 95®, and don't need to be reminded every time I boot (Happens quite often). As it turns out, creating an animated startup screen is a rather simple though time consuming task. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What's required: 1.The desire to get rid of that annoying Windows Logo. 2.A picture to animate, this should be a 256 Color 320 x 400 Windows BMP, this seems a strange size because the startup screen uses a mode that puts that resolution on the screen. I tend to do my designing on a 640 x 400 image then scale it using a graphics utility, this makes it easier to get the proportions correct. 3.A graphics Utility that can directly edit the Palette of an image. (I have yet to decide what is the best for this, I've been trying out a few different ones, and think the final choice will be either Paint Shop Pro or LView Pro. PSP has the advantage because you can edit the image with it while LView Pro has the better image manipulation tools.) 4.A hex editor. This is crucial, (Hopefully it wont be needed in the future as I am working on a program that will allow manipulation of the bits changed to allow this animation, and display the animation without rebooting.) DONE! AniLogo.exe is the one. 5.Patience, getting all the right colors in all the right places can be time consuming. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Steps to create Animated Logo: First a word about the 'animation' this is not true animation, this is palette animation, this means that only the colors of areas on the screen change, not the shape of the areas. This is accomplished by the manipulation of the pictures palette, so far I have got 2 scenarios figured out, the first simply rotates the palette from a selected starting point through to the end continuously, this is the method used by the default startup logo. The second seems to step through the palette to the end and back again. Designing an animation using this technique can be a bit of a challenge. 1.Create, borrow or whatever, just get yourself a picture to animate. One of my first attempts was a bitmap of flowers, simple but appealing. I found a JPG that's 640 x 480 TrueColor. 2.Correct the size of your picture. Resize the image to 320 x 400 using your choice of tools. 3.You will need a few unused colors in the palette to use for your animation. So at this point you want to reduce the color depth of your image to something under 256. I'm going to use the same kind of animation that the default logo uses at the bottom of my image so I'm going to need 20 colors. (If you count you'll find that there are 20 boxes across the screen) So I need to reduce the number of colors in my image to 236. I find that doing this step after resizing generally results in a better image. 4.At this point I generally go in and set the unused colors I'm going to be animating (Must be at the END of the palette) to unique colors that are not used anywhere else in the picture. This makes it easier to do the editing because some editors will use the first matching color in the palette rather than the one selected. This can get quite frustrating, you think you've set that last box to a specific color to be animated, and it never changes because it actually got set to a non animated color earlier in the palette. 5.Now add the elements to be animated to your picture, in this case I am putting 20 boxes across the bottom of the picture, and setting them to each successive color I set in the previous step. 6.Now go back and set those colors to what you actually want them to be. In my case I started with black, faded to green and back to black in those last 20 palette entries. 7.Save your picture as a 256 color Windows Bitmap (.BMP), it will have to be renamed later. 8.Save your original LOGO.SYS if any. 9.Load the file into 'XrX Animated Logo Utility', then set the number of colors to animate, in the example above starting at 236, the number of colors animated is 20. You can then select 'Test Animation' to view the animation. This works best with the number of screen colors set higher than 256. At 256 colors you can get the general idea of the animation, but most dont display quite right. If you wish to see you logo full screen, Double Click on the logo, click again to return to the small view. New in this version is the ability to store a description and author name in a logo file, this is available in the INFO tab The file can now be saved over top of the original or saved with a different name. If your C: drive isn't compressed, the logo can be installed from here as well. I am working on compressed drive install. The reverse option in the Startup Options window allows you to reverse the direction of the animation. More new feature include the addition of a border that shows the border that will appear on some systems when they boot (this appears to be working, but I am not 100% sure about it) In this version you can drag a logo file from the explorer onto the logo utility. Another minor addition is hot links to the Internet, if your system is Internet capable, clicking the blue underlined labels on the info page will start either your mail program or your web browser. Just added is full screen animation, while it is slow on most machnes, it does work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This is a stable release, please report any bugs to XrX Computer Applications via E-Mail at support@xrxlogo.com or via the Feedback Page on the XRX Web Site : http://www.xrxlogo.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Good luck creating your own logo's, I wouldn't mind seeing other peoples work, or if you have any comments you can send me E-Mail. Karl McMurdo (XrX) - kmcmurdo@nucleus.com ================================================================ Win 95 animated start-up logo installation instructions ================================================================ ! *.sys file type is usually hidden in most people's computers under Win95. Hence, you might have trouble in finding *.sys files for copying files. To see these hidden files, you can use either suggestion below. suggestion a. go to Explorer choose View menu, then select Options... in the dialog, enable "Show all files" suggestion b. use a DOS window, in which most *.sys files can be viewed normally ---------------------------------------------------------------- 0. Extract the new .SYS file to a temporary directory. ---------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Move (backup) original "start-up" logo, "LOGO.SYS" from the root directory of your boot drive, usually C:\ to another temporary directory. (If you are using a compression utility or cannot locate the logo.sys file, please see the notes below.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Use DOS window or Explorer to copy new logo file to the root directory, renaming the new copy to "LOGO.SYS" (If you are using a compression utility, please see the notes below.) Example of DOS command: copy c:\temp_dir\xrxlogo.sys c:\logo.sys ---------------------------------------------------------------- 3. Restart your computer and you're done! ---------------------------------------------------------------- ======= Note: ======= * If you are using a compression utility on your boot drive, you must put logo.sys in the host for that drive. (For example, if drive C: is compressed and its host is the G: drive, then logo.sys should be placed in the root directory of the G: drive.) * The default logo.sys is embedded in io.sys file. If you cannot find logo.sys in your drives, including the host drive (see above), chances are Win95 is using the logo that is embedded in io.sys as your start up logo. In this case, you don't have logo.sys to backup. Simply place the new logo.sys in the root directory of your boot (host) drive. Logo.sys in the root directory will take precedence of the one embedded in io.sys file. To get back to the original win95 logo, simply rename the logo.sys to other name. * To restore the original win95 logo, you must save (backup) the file in step 1. Then just copy the original logo to the designated directory. * You can create your own Win95 logo files. They must be in 320 x 400 (256 colors) bitmap format. Although the real size displayed is 640 x 400, Win95 will stretch these logo files when displaying them. If you want to create an animated logo, see my instruction page on the internet at http://www.nucleus.com/~kmcmurdo/win95logo.html More animated Logo's can be found on the sample page linked to the instruction page above. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Thanks to Rob Chen whose instructions for installing Windows 95 logo files I have blatantly plagiarised. ---------------------------------------------------------------- * If you have any questions or comments, please e-mail me. Karl McMurdo karl@xrx.ca XrX Computer Applications support@xrxlogo.com