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Changing the WFWG 3.11 Splash Screen Summary: Those of you familiar with Windows 3.x have probably long since gotten tired of the rather boring (by today's standards, anyway) splash screen that it puts up as it loads. You can change that splash screen, but doing so is a less than obvious task. This post walks you through the steps needed to accomplish the installation of a new Win3x splash screen. Post Body: Windows 3.1 debuted in 1992 and we have been looking at the same tired old Win 3.x splash screen ever since. There is nothing wrong with it; it is just ... tired at this point. More than one person has thought to update the splash screen, only to be stopped quickly by the seeming complexity of the undertaking. This complexity stems from the fact that the splash screen image is required to be in the fairly obscure Windows RLE-BMP ("RLE") format AND that image is embedded into the win.com executable. BOTH of these present challenges to those wishing to change the splash screen. Happily, with the right tools, changing the splash screen is not THAT complicated. It is not a "brain dead simple" task, but it is quite doable for a motivated user. At a high level, the below are the major steps of the process. First, gather what you need: Get and install Graphics Workshop from the DOS archive of this site. Get and install LView Pro 1.D2 from the Windows 3.x archive of this site. Select an image that you want to use as a splash screen. Save a copy of \windows\win.com and \windows\system\vgalogo.rle to a safe place. Second, use the above to install your selected image into the Win3.x splash screen: From Windows, use LviewPro to resize it and save it as a Windows BMP file (typically this will be a 16-bit or 24-bit color BMP). From DOS, use GWS to convert the BMP file to a 4-bit, 16 color Windows RLE file. From DOS, use Windows Setup to create a new win.com embedding the RLE file you created in step 2. Restart Windows and enjoy your new splash screen! Here are the details of each step: Step "Zero": Before we start steps 1-4 above, select an image you would like to use as the splash screen. In my case, I really didn't like the teal colored background that the native splash screen uses, so I selected one that was similar, but with a white background: Step One: Open the image you have selected in step "zero" and use LViewPro (or any other competent image viewer/editor) to resize the image to roughly 440x330. Save the result as a Windows BMP. This BMP will typically be 24-bit or 16-bit color, and because it is a BMP, it may be quite large. The size of the file is not important at this point, but the image dimensions are. Do not exceed dimensions of approximately 440x330 (particularly the 440 part of that) or your image may not display properly and Windows may even fail to boot. In my case, I did the resizing with Photoshop 4.0, which is installed in my DOS/Win environment, but there is no dependency on this particular tool - it was just there and very definitely "competent". LView Pro and IrfanView (both available in the Win3.x archive of this site) will do an equally excellent job of size reducing and saving as a BMP. Step Two: From DOS, use Graphics Workshop (GWS) to convert your BMP file to a 4-bit, 16-color Windows RLE file. GWS is the "secret sauce" of this approach. Very few other tools are able to convert BMP to 4-bit RLE. To do this, start GWS (I used v6.1, which is what is available on this site) and navigate to the image of interest. Select it, but don't open it (in the presented file list, move the cursor down to the file of interest, but don't press Enter). Press F9 (for "Effects"). From the menu that presents, select "Color Reduction". From the menu that presents, select "Remap". From the menu that presents, select "Windows 16 Colors" and finally, from the menu that presents, select "RLE (Windows 3)". At this point, GWS writes your size-reduced, color-reduced RLE image out, with "x_" prepended to the filename and the extention changed from "BMP" to "RLE". Once it is done, quit GWS. Now for a critically important checkpoint: the RLE file that has been created must be less than approximately 44KB. If it is not, repeat the above until it is, making changes as necessary (usually progressively reducing the dimensions of the RLE image does the trick). Do not proceed to the next step until your RLE file is less than 44KB, or very close to that. Step Three: Use Windows Setup (setup.exe) from the DOS environment to install your new RLE. The method is indirect, and not obvious, but it works well. Here are its steps: Copy your RLE file to \windows\system\vgalogo.rle. This overwrites the existing vgalogo.rle, which is why in the above "getting ready" steps, you saved off a copy of the original. This ensure that you can get back to where you were if something messes up. cd to \windows and run setup.exe. On the "System Information" page that is presented, navigate to the "Display" line, take note of what it currently is, and then change it to ANYTHING except that. For no good reason, I have always selected one of the SVGA lines. Now, go back to the "Display" line and change it back to what it originally was. Press Enter to accept the "changes" and then press Enter again to retain the drivers that are already on the system. At this point, Windows appears to pause/stutter for a moment. What it is doing is rebuilding \windows\win.com, embedding your RLE imagew (now \windows\system\vgalogo.rle) into it as the splash screen. Now for another critically important checkpoint: the win.com file that has been created must be less than 64KB or Windows will not boot. If it is not less than 64KB, it is usually because the RLE file is too large. Repeat the above, making changes as necessary, until win.com is less than 64KB. cd back to c:\, type "win" and enjoy your new splash screen! Now that you know the process, you can run through it over and over again with whatever images you would like to try, until you find one you really like. Thats it!