Marztabator

Well unfortunately I don't know an awful lot about "animated bitmaps" and how much they're supposed to differ structure wise from a regular bitmap... I thought I read somewhere though that Windows more or less creates the scroll effect "on the spot" out of any bitmap and which colours it uses depends on how the bitmap's palette is setup???

Okay, back again after some absence. I meant to ask something I should've asked back then. I did try to rip the logo data from memory using the debugger included with DOSBox Daum (the latest version). I carefully found the routine that makes it unpack the custom-packed data embedded within IO.SYS and followed it carefully. Although I do indeed see the familiar bitmap header and the correct/decrunched data that follows........ I can never get the whole file at once. It always unpacks in seperate chunks and then overwrites itself afterwards, rather than just unpacking it into a single BMP file and leaving it in memory for me to rip. I've tried everything. I can't even get the seperate pieces to put them together. I combed through the entire memory chunk (using a combination of the debugger and my hex editor of choice, HxD) and can't find any other bitmap-related data unpacked elsewhere. I'm not sure if memory-ripping is how rloew does it but he must know something else about it that's flummoxing me. Is Windows just being really clever and unpacking the rest of the bitmap into some inaccessible part of the memory?

Interesting. May take me a while to setup another VM though to test this out (it obviously won't extract the contents under 7), so nobody, like, close this thread or anything!

I don't want to change IO.SYS itself. I want the logo that's inside it. I want to get that out into a new file and make *that* my LOGO.SYS for use in other 9x systems. Why is this so difficult for people to understand? Am I really that bad at words?

Those people specialize in removing the logos from the file though. They probably don't know what section to rip out and how to unpack it.

Yeah, I wouldn't know how to "realign" a system file I'm afraid. That and I feel it's only fair that a publicly known way to "rescue" the logo from the "prison" that is IO.SYS is revealed. I see nothing especially fair about that. I consider it one of my Trade Secrets. I might just see if it's possible to rip the logo out from a memory dump with DOSBox Daum's debugger at this rate...

Yeah, I wouldn't know how to "realign" a system file I'm afraid. That and I feel it's only fair that a publicly known way to "rescue" the logo from the "prison" that is IO.SYS is revealed. And why not use the Windows 98 logo in Windows 95? I like the idea of mixing things up, and like I said, I always considered it prettier looking than the 95 one.

That's great to know! But is it something that's easy to pull off, particularly in absence of an easy tool similar to IO8DCOMP? Will I need to be using DOSBox's debugger or something?

See, this is precisely the problem I found with similar questions being responded to online. People seem to think that creating a LOGO.SYS file and placing it in C:\ is the only answer. If you want a custom loading screen yes, but the fact remains I want to use the *original* boot logo - which is currently trapped inside IO.SYS - outside of its original OS.

Guys, guys............ I already know how to unpack ME's IO.SYS file and extract the bitmap out of it. This is what I already mentioned in my post! The IO.SYS I need help with relates to MS-DOS 7.1 (and by extension 7.0) as used in Win98 (and 95). That's generally not packed apart from the logo itself, which according to rloew is compressed in a different format. We need a tool or something for *that*.

Does one need to use a resource editor to extract certain modules out of the file? If so, I'm not sure if there's one out there that supports 16-bit DOS files - even eXeScope can't handle it.

While building myself a nice little Windows 95 virtual environment, I figured I might choose to mix things up and use the boot logo from Windows 98 since I reckon it looks prettier. Wondering why I couldn't find the startup logo (or "logo.sys") amongst the CAB archives on my 98SE CD, I googled for information and discovered that apparently the default startup animation is hidden inside the system file IO.SYS. Only problem is that I don't know how to get it out of there. I looked at it (as well as its renamed equivalent "winboot.sys") through a hex editor and It doesn't appear to be in bitmap format, or at least not have the proper header to make it stand out easily. What's odd is that the Windows ME version - from playing around with the file on my ME CD and unpacking it with IO8DCOMP - has an obvious bitmap file inside that can be extracted easily (but is otherwise identical to "sulogo.sys"). So why is the pre-ME equivalent more difficult to deal with? I googled everywhere hoping someone had the same idea as me and received or gave out the answers I was looking for - the closest I got was with this guy on this very board, who rather unfortunately was ignored and the thread forgotten about relatively quickly. All I'm looking for is the means to extract this default logo/animation out of the file and NOT a guide on how to use a replacement "logo.sys" like most similar questions on the net ended with. I've read the odd suggestion that a utility or two exists that should deal with this, but nobody ever mentioned any names. Anyone care to help? Thank you.