WildBill

My program is done now, and it fixes the .ICO files with excellent results. It basically drops pixels where the alpha is less than 128 and for 128 <= alpha <= 255 it adds enough white background so it can make the alpha 255. You can either open one icon at a time or an entire folder, and if you open a folder it loads all .ICO files it finds in that folder or any subfolders. Every loaded .ICO file goes into a list and if you click on an entry all icons in the file show up below (and you can mouse over each one to see the RGBA values). To fix all the icons at once, you would do the following: - Select File...Open folder to open the folder - Select Edit..Select all to highlight all the icons in the list - Select Edit...Stencil to fix the icons in memory - Select File...Save all to overwrite the original files There are toolbar buttons and hotkeys so that it's easy to use. The only caveat is that the dialog for selecting a folder can't see hidden folders, so you have to temporarily unhide the WINNT/XPize folder, or (what I did) copy the XPize folder, fix the copy, and then copy back to the original. The only problem I'm having now is getting XPize to reload the icons into the files it changed. Is there an easy way to do this? Once i draw a nice icon for the program and clean up the GUI a little I can email it to someone, if anyone has way to host it somewhere...

I just tried installing XPIze 4.0 on a W2kProSP4 that I had on a spare hard drive, and I don't get the weird black borders around the icons (though I also don't get any XP icons, either). I installed it after patching so 256-color icons can show up in the taskbar, if that means anything. My logon screen was similarly patched to read XP Pro, and the time zone settings map looks nice. So far I haven't seen any strange visual artifacts, but I'll put it through its paces to see what's what. EDIT: Ah, yeah, there the artifacts are. XPero, do the bitmaps you use contain alpha information (that is, do they use alpha blending)? Win2k should have no trouble displaying 32-bpp bitmaps (and it can technically perform alpha-blending, just as XP can), but it might not be calling AlphaBlend() to display them, which would preclude using bitmaps that relied on alpha-blending. Win2k can handle high-color icons, but it might require a version of XPize where the alphas were only 0 or 255. It's possible that Win2k simply calls something like MaskBlt() to display icons, which requires a monochrome mask (that is, alpha = 0 or 255 but nothing else). EDIT #2: I found the spec on the .ICO format and wrote a program that can read all the icons in a file and display them. Looking at the icons in the XPize folder, it looks like that's exactly the case, where the icon is performing alpha-blending (technically, the AND-bitmap in the .ICO file extends over areas where the alpha value in the XOR-bitmap is less than 255). Tomorrow I'll see if I can write a program that will recursively go through all of the .ICO files in the XPize folder and "fix" them for W2k. My gut tells me that, when alpha is 128 or higher, to add enough white background so I can make the alpha 255, and drop all pixels where the alpha is 127 or less. I'll know if it works sometime tomorrow night. I haven't even tried the XPize settings program to see if I can get it to reload the icons once I've changed them, but I assume that that's what it's for.

*drool* XPize for W2k? Please? Pretty please?

I have an HP laptop with a built-in Mini-PCI LAN-Express wireless modem (combination 56k modem and 802.11b wireless LAN card). I've had a heck of a hard time getting WEP encryption to work on it, and for now at least I've settled on the free version of WPA Assistant. It seems to work for the most part, but every once in a while the PC freezes for an instant when I'm doing certain things (e.g. run 16-bit apps). For those of you who use wireless and Win2k, what do you use? Is there something better?

I've been using ZipGenius for a couple of years now.

I've been following this project for a while, and it's just amazing to watch. Gurgelmeyer, how you do this without an army of people delving into how Win2k works is astonishing. /bow Here's a trivial idea...maybe a better cards.dll for us solitaire junkies? The 16-color cardbacks are pretty crummy. I don't know what newer versions of Windows use and whether 2k would start giving off smoke if it tried using them anyway (wouldn't that be hilarious if they used the same old cardbacks after all the effort of putting eyecandy into Windows?). Anyhow, I found a site that has their own cards.dll with no restrictions on use: http://ammaxamma.com/