<!--quoteo(post=1636322:date=Jun 28 2007, 08:00 AM:name=scaryface)--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(scaryface @ Jun 28 2007, 08:00 AM) [snapback]1636322[/snapback]</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec--> a worthy topic bump... (resized from 1440x900) I sorta edited my visual style but mostly just to the extent of recoloring, partly because i'm lazy (whoever invented the default green on blue theme should be shot) i'm most interested in what spacejesus did to get his results <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
He hex'd the windows resource files to point to different pictures. If you've never done hex editing, it is quite fun, but I would definitely NOT start out by hexing your own OS. Start with something small and simple. If you've played WC3 online, you'll have heard of WC3Banlist. That is a great example of how to do it, I taught my friend using it and now we both run custom versions of the beta. You can change many things, but the easiest is strings. For example, the beta has an autorefresh feature that temporarily fills the game with fakeplayers to refrtesh it in the game list. By searching through the compiled executable, you can find the strings that are both the fakeplayer's name and the command string you type in-game to run it. We changed the name to a greenish-coloured VOMIT and the command to /pukezor (That's one thing to watch out for, there are two types of strings, fixed and null-terminated. In a null-terminated string you can insert pretty much anything, but a fixed string, like the command one was, requires it to be the <i>exact same</i> number of characters. So instead of /vomit, or even /puke, we had to use /pukezor, which happens to be the same number of characters as /refresh).
It sounds like he did essentially the same thing, but to an internal windows DLL that controls the visual resources used by the OS. Basically, he went in and searched for the strings that contained the default pictures (they would not contain the pictures themselves, rather pointers in the form of a file location or resource location within another compiled file, more likely) and changed them to instead point to his own custom files.
And spacejesus, if you're reading this, have you found the resource location to the windows bootstrap picture? There's a copy of it in the windows directory, but it's only a copy, as changing it doesn't replace the image when booting up.
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yup in use now
<img src="http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m160/Super_Triod/CopyofNewBitmapImage.jpg" border="0" alt="IPB Image" />
my second profile in works
a worthy topic bump...
(resized from 1440x900) I sorta edited my visual style but mostly just to the extent of recoloring, partly because i'm lazy (whoever invented the default green on blue theme should be shot)
i'm most interested in what spacejesus did to get his results
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
He hex'd the windows resource files to point to different pictures. If you've never done hex editing, it is quite fun, but I would definitely NOT start out by hexing your own OS. Start with something small and simple. If you've played WC3 online, you'll have heard of WC3Banlist. That is a great example of how to do it, I taught my friend using it and now we both run custom versions of the beta. You can change many things, but the easiest is strings. For example, the beta has an autorefresh feature that temporarily fills the game with fakeplayers to refrtesh it in the game list. By searching through the compiled executable, you can find the strings that are both the fakeplayer's name and the command string you type in-game to run it. We changed the name to a greenish-coloured VOMIT and the command to /pukezor (That's one thing to watch out for, there are two types of strings, fixed and null-terminated. In a null-terminated string you can insert pretty much anything, but a fixed string, like the command one was, requires it to be the <i>exact same</i> number of characters. So instead of /vomit, or even /puke, we had to use /pukezor, which happens to be the same number of characters as /refresh).
It sounds like he did essentially the same thing, but to an internal windows DLL that controls the visual resources used by the OS. Basically, he went in and searched for the strings that contained the default pictures (they would not contain the pictures themselves, rather pointers in the form of a file location or resource location within another compiled file, more likely) and changed them to instead point to his own custom files.
And spacejesus, if you're reading this, have you found the resource location to the windows bootstrap picture? There's a copy of it in the windows directory, but it's only a copy, as changing it doesn't replace the image when booting up.