Daedalus Service - Alpha Blending Icons for NT4/2000

[alexanrs]

Hi, I'm here to present a nice little project I developed with the guys at winprj.net

It is Daedalus, a project was meant to introduce 32-bit Alpha-Blended icons support in Windows NT 4, and later expanded to work on Windows 2000 too. It is implemented as a service, therefore can be started/stopped on demand, which can be useful in case some conflict arises, though ideally that should never happen

Instructions, the changelog and the download can be found at the winprj.net's topic right here:

http://www.winprj.net/board/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=399

Screenshot (combined with NT4 Visual Update 3 Beta 2):

Edited February 1, 2009 by alexanrs

[WildBill]

Pretty neat. And it's in Delphi! Woohoo!

One little nitpick: you have to use -d to uninstall, not -u. Some icons also come up blank when I run it, unfortunately. That said, even though I don't have MadCHook, I'm tempted to integrate it with SmoothText and try to fix the issues in it since SmoothText also overrides API calls.

[alexanrs]

Windows 2000, right? And what icons, from ICO files or EXEs and DLLs?

[WildBill]

The problem icons are all in the system tray:

- Sage TV 5

- Norton Internet Security 2002

- Palm Hotsync Manager

[alexanrs]

I'll try to look into it, thanks

[blackwingcat]

Hi, it works well. But it has some problems.

1. It prevents from load 16 colors icon.

2. Can't display 32bit icons example

Edited February 23, 2009 by win2000

[marxo]

Can't display 32bit icons example

I don't wish to be rude, but you should read the official thread on WPC where it says that it can't sometimes load 32-bit icons from pure .ico file.

[WildBill]

Wold this help?

IconViewer 1.4

I originally wrote it to remove the alpha-blending from icons so they wouldn't have the black halos on Win2k, but perhaps you could use the part that loads the icon files.

Edited February 27, 2009 by WildBill

[Colonel O'Neill]

Does Daedalus suffer from the same drawbacks as Tihiy's RPL2K.DLL?

Such as reverting to 16 colour icons when:

- Active Desktop is on

- NetMeeting's Remote Desktop is on

- Places Bar on certain file open/save dialogs.

EDIT:

It apparently will not freak out when Active Desktop is on.

It does cause floating point errors in many programs.

- A bit of weird behavior that was remedied by a re-install.

Same red tinged alphas while dragging icons.

Alt+Tab is also not 32bit.

It seems like 98 is now better than 2000 at 32-bit icons.

Edited April 6, 2009 by Colonel O'Neill

[Colonel O'Neill]

Major bug:

When the Daedalus Service is Started (services.msc) MS Word 2003 will crash and ask to recover my work and restart word. This will happen no matter what. Sometimes it will open to a new blank window, and further interaction with it causes the error. This is fixed by Stopping the Daedalus service from Services.msc.

Anyone else having the same problem?

[Colonel O'Neill]

File cannot be downloaded:

"You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post."

[marxo]

You can't download if you are not registered, same as all other boards.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Ahh, used bugmenot the first time.

[bob2000]

Daedalus is great !

The only bug I have found is that IconTweaker will not start (or run properly) if the Deadalus service is running.

So when I want to use IconTweaker, I must stop the service first, make the icon changes, and then re-start the service (and sometimes the shell icon cache needs to be cleared).

This happens on Windows 2000 Professional and Windows 2000 Server.

Apologies if this problem has already been reported: seeing as IconTweaker is what many use to update their system icons, I though I'd mention this issue.

Edited April 25, 2009 by bob2000

[Colonel O'Neill]

It appears to do the same thing to Office 2003 applications...