[rgoer]

Holy crap!!! This god of geek-dom actually hacked the BootX file, and is willing to share his secrets. Check this out if you are unhappy with the grey apple logo...

[dazzla]

lmao

It does look tempting, who's gonna try it first

[Rickster]

I've been doing this on my laptop since Public Beta... works fine.

BTW, BootX also has the OS badge icons that the Startup Manager (hold option key at boot) uses. You can surprise the heck out of someone by changing theirs so that it looks like one of their partitions has NeXTSTEP or Windows or something on it.

[Jan Van Boghout]

Rickster, do you know if it's possible to change the background of the boot screen too?
That way the modern happy Mac like in the 10.2 betas can really come back. It would look like crap on the new dark background�

[OwlBoy]

Woo Hoo!

http://files.owlboy.com/bootxhack.html

-Owl

[Rickster]

Rickster, do you know if it's possible to change the background of the boot screen too?

Nope, no luck there.

[rgoer]

Is OwlBoy just leading us on?:
http://files.owlboy.com/bootxhack.html

I see nothing here...

[cwasko]

Originally posted by rgoer:


I see nothing here...

There is a movie embeded in the HTML file. U may not have the QT plugin or something.

[rgoer]

Originally posted by cwasko:


There is a movie embeded in the HTML file. U may not have the QT plugin or something.

So there is. I didn't wait long enough before to see it fully loaded... Cool boot hack, OwlBoy.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Rickster:
BTW, BootX also has the OS badge icons that the Startup Manager (hold option key at boot) uses. You can surprise the heck out of someone by changing theirs so that it looks like one of their partitions has NeXTSTEP or Windows or something on it.

Rickster, do you know where the textual name of the disk that is displayed by the Startup Manager is stored?

[OwlBoy]

Originally posted by rgoer:


So there is. I didn't wait long enough before to see it fully loaded... Cool boot hack, OwlBoy.

Thanks

Sorry for the speed, its bein hosted off my poor like cable connection with not the best upstream it seems.

-Owl

[benh57]

Originally posted by rgoer:
Holy crap!!! This god of geek-dom actually hacked the BootX file, and is willing to share his secrets. Check this out if you are unhappy with the grey apple logo...

Um, its open source and easy to edit the file. You don't exactly need to be a god of geekdom to figure something out when you have the sourcecode for it... was only a matter of time till someone put together something for less savvy users.

-Ben

[rgoer]

Originally posted by benh57:
...you have the sourcecode for it...

Lay it on me, brother; I'm all about learning. Where can I find this source? I'm now curious to see it...

[:haripu:]

So we now only need someone to figure out how to replace the (terrible) rainbow cursor with the (classy) blue marble.

why did they drop the blue marble in the first place?

[Phoenix1701]

Ahem. In case anyone is too lazy to make their own replacement... I sort of like this one:



Click to download the .raw file. I'd just include BootX, but all sorts of file type issues develop if I do that, and besides, it's needless bandwidth. Enjoy!

[Ibson]

That's a very nice startup image. It looks like it came from Apple itself, especially with the use of Myriad . I still miss that "hello" and shiny blue blob, however. Maybe it was a rainy day in Cupertino when they designed the current one�

[Marshall]

It looks like the background color (displayed while the boot image is visible) is the second color in the color table used for the boot image (3 bytes starting at 0x129BD - hex:BFBFBF, decimal:191-191-191).

Discovered this by accident while making a full-color "Hello" message using the HAL 9000 icon from IconFactory's World of Aqua 3.

[Phoenix1701]

Y'know... it's a very simple process for a programmer to open a file and write raw data at a specific given offset... I wonder if we're going to see Bootimageographer any time soon.

And yes, I know messing with BootX is bad enough, and letting some developer mess with it for you is even worse, but Duality works... mostly. lol.

And I'm glad you caught Myriad in that image... I didn't know I had it until I went looking for it. *grin*

[Kristoff]

BootX is old news.....at least to those of us that used Linux on our machines prior to OS X PB two years ago.

I had my OS 9 partition and my SuSE partition had a little Penguin icon I had pasted in there at the boot option panel.

Then when X came out, I had all three...the 9, the X, and Tux.

[Brien]

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
Ahem. In case anyone is too lazy to make their own replacement... I sort of like this one:



Click to download the .raw file. I'd just include BootX, but all sorts of file type issues develop if I do that, and besides, it's needless bandwidth. Enjoy!

Great job, pheonix. It looks VERY nice.

[starfleetX]

Originally posted by brien:
Great job, pheonix. It looks VERY nice.

Just to give credit where it is due, that Mac is just a greyscale version of the icon by IconFactory in the "World of Aqua" set.

[Gene Jockey]

Originally posted by Phoenix1701:
Ahem. In case anyone is too lazy to make their own replacement... I sort of like this one:



<snip>

I quite like that. Installed, looks great! I decided to change the Boot Panel to be retro as well:



I like it, anyway...

--J

[chris_h]

Originally posted by Gene Jockey:

'

post .raw file please

[Gene Jockey]

Originally posted by chris_h:
'

post .raw file please

That's just the boot panel, for when all the system services are coming up. I wanted to put that (or at least the "Welcome" box) into the BootX file but it needs to be 128x128, so that was a no go. But if you want this as your startup panel, download this and replace the file of the same name here:

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemStarter/QuartzDisplay.bundle/Resources/

So now you can have the "Welcome to Macintosh" box back where it goes, at service startup.

--J

[chris.p]

anyway to change the look of the initial blue progress bar (after the grey screen?)

[mr_sonicblue]

[OwlBoy]

Originally posted by mr_sonicblue:

Cool!

-Owl

[matthewmodern]

A bounty for someone to extract the graphic from the beta version of Jaguar with the new "hello" graphic which everyone was arguing about for a while. (ver.C98?)

I really loved that graphic, and want to put it back in. Any takers? You will have my eternal gratitude.

[Millennium]

Originally posted by benh57:
Um, its open source and easy to edit the file. You don't exactly need to be a god of geekdom to figure something out when you have the sourcecode for it... was only a matter of time till someone put together something for less savvy users.

Um... the only thing is, if I'm remembering correctly who you are, you're rather a god of geekdom yourself. So perhaps you're not the best one to say you don't need to be a good of geekdom; of course this would be easy for you to do. You're a programmer, and one who has worked with bootloaders before. For someone who doesn't code, this would be an incredibly impressive feat.

Now, my question is this. Is the BootX file from Darwin's CVS identical to the one from Jaguar, or failing that, can it be used to boot Jaguar? I realize that doing this with the kernel isn't advisable, because the OSX kernel has features not in Darwin, but what about the bootloader? I say this, because if you can get Jaguar-capable BootX code, you may be able to do a great deal more with it than the hex-editing tricks posted here. Not to belittle what this guy has done, which is great, but more is possible if you actually have source for a bootloader which could support Jaguar.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Um... the only thing is, if I'm remembering correctly who you are, you're rather a god of geekdom yourself. So perhaps you're not the best one to say you don't need to be a good of geekdom; of course this would be easy for you to do. You're a programmer, and one who has worked with bootloaders before. For someone who doesn't code, this would be an incredibly impressive feat.

Err.. yeah, what he said. Also, another thing is not how hard it is to do (and write a tutorial of course) but more like that he did it. I really don't care if you (ben) or Rick are telling us that it'd be very easy. So props to him for actually doing it

And I'll be um, getting 10.2 maybe Tuesday, so I can't do this yet, but would anyone be kind enough to post the .act/color table file? I promise to make a few images and post them here if you do

Thirdly, has anyone followed up on Marshall's comment? Marshall, are you saying you modified the colors? Care to tell us how?

[yukon]

lol, lets see that application! quite the cool idea

[Jan Van Boghout]

Soooo� We can modify both picture and background. And is a custom color palette possible too? Well, then we can make almost anything with this knowledge (if the pic is within 128x128 bounds).

Now to get that spinning thing replaced

[amonitzer]

Originally posted by Jan Van Boghout:
Soooo� We can modify both picture and background. And is a custom color palette possible too? Well, then we can make almost anything with this knowledge (if the pic is within 128x128 bounds).

Now to get that spinning thing replaced

The background uses color #1 of the color palette, replace it (just export the palette in Photoshop) and you can use any color you want, but be aware that the spinning wheel's colors are also part of that palette. Judging from the hex codes, the wheel's images are appended after the Apple logo, so it should be possible to replace them too.

Of course, by recompiling BootX you should be able to do nearly anything you want (simulating Mac OS 7 anyone?).

[Synotic]

Originally posted by Jan Van Boghout:
Soooo� We can modify both picture and background. And is a custom color palette possible too? Well, then we can make almost anything with this knowledge (if the pic is within 128x128 bounds).

Now to get that spinning thing replaced

Well also theoretically size shouldn't matter... Right? One limitation that wasn't listed is the 256 color thing. Although it's any 256 colors, not a fixed number. So we're pretty free in terms of design (again, theoretically)

[Millennium]

Well, I took a look through my own BootX file (I'm still on 10.1.5).

I found the OS badges for the bootloader (X, 9, and something else where the contrast was too low for me to read). But I couldn't find the OSX version of the Happy Mac (which is different from the one used in OS9, so I'm a bit perplexed by this). I may have simply overlooked it, though.

I don't think that the SPROD is in the BootX file, though. Particularly not in Jaguar, since it doesn't appear at that point in the boot sequence anymore. More likely, it's in the kernel itself.

However, unless I'm mistaken, it is present in Darwin's kernel (those corresponding to the 10.0.x and 10.1.x series, anyway, since it shows up momentarily during the boot sequence). Therefore someone could modify the Darwin kernel's source and thus modify the SPROD. By itself, this isn't enough, because that kernel could not boot OSX. But by changng the SPROD to something that could easily be found with a hex editor and then examining the code around it, one might be able to find corresponding code in the OSX kernel, and thus where OSX's SPROD is. And since it stands to reason that it's probably stored in the same format for both kernels, it may be possible to make a SPROD editor that way.

[Marshall]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Marshall, are you saying you modified the colors? Care to tell us how?

Yes, just create a 128x128 256-color-indexed image in Photoshop, save out your color table as a .ACT file, and save out the image as a .RAW file. Then paste all the bytes from the .ACT and the bytes from the .RAW into BootX at the locations given by the tutorial.

Just keep in mind that the second color in the palette is the background color (191-191-191 for the Apple logo). Composite an anti-aliased shadowed image against the background color, and you can have some pretty nice boot graphics. 256 colors isn't bad for a 128x128 space.

I didn't notice any change in the colors of the progress indicator when I did this; YMMV.

[bewebste]

Originally posted by CharlesS:

Rickster, do you know where the textual name of the disk that is displayed by the Startup Manager is stored?

I believe that this information is actually stored for each partition as bitmap data on the partition itself. For HFS I think it was stored in the boot blocks; for HFS+, which doesn't have boot blocks, I would think it would be in the startup file, but I'm not sure.

I noticed that when I installed Jaguar on my system, which included reformatting the partition I was installing onto, that the name is now anti-aliased, whereas my OS 9 partition name is not.

[israces]

outstanding work owlboy!
nice.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Millennium:
Well, I took a look through my own BootX file (I'm still on 10.1.5).

[edit: this didn't belong in this thread.]

[Synotic]

Originally posted by Marshall:


Yes, just create a 128x128 256-color-indexed image in Photoshop, save out your color table as a .ACT file, and save out the image as a .RAW file. Then paste all the bytes from the .ACT and the bytes from the .RAW into BootX at the locations given by the tutorial.

Just keep in mind that the second color in the palette is the background color (191-191-191 for the Apple logo). Composite an anti-aliased shadowed image against the background color, and you can have some pretty nice boot graphics. 256 colors isn't bad for a 128x128 space.

I didn't notice any change in the colors of the progress indicator when I did this; YMMV.

Hmm.. ok, so if I want to change the background color, would I simply have to do it manually via the text or does Photoshop have a color table modifier?

[Millennium]

Originally posted by CharlesS:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=116732

Um... I'm not sure I understand the relevance of that link.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by Millennium:

Um... I'm not sure I understand the relevance of that link.

Never mind, it's nothing. A friend had a problem where his CD burner wasn't recognized in Jaguar, while earlier version had recognized it. I told him how to modify the driver so that it would show up as recognized. It worked, but it made me think of that thread again. Then, as I was browsing the forums, what do I find, but Millennium poking around inside /System! I just thought it was rather amusing and ironic, that's all.

Disregard it. I posted it in a weak moment.

[darkcore]

By using some of the same methods used to change the startup logo, the default arrow cursor and spinning wheel of doom and other osx cursors can be changed, http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=121657

Thought id post the link to this thread here since they were similar and also I didn't want it to get buried.

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by darkcore:
By using some of the same methods used to change the startup logo, the default arrow cursor and spinning wheel of doom and other osx cursors can be changed, http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=121657

Thought id post the link to this thread here since they were similar and also I didn't want it to get buried.

Argh! What did I just spend all evening digging through this crap for, if they were already found yesterday?!

Ah well. I guess if anyone wants the old 256-color pinwheel that was in Mac OS X Server, I could e-mail it to you, because I found it in the Darwin 1.4.1 sources, for the version of Darwin that ships with 10.1. Not sure what it's good for, because it's not what I was looking for, but that's what I got out of this. I also found the original 10.1 Happy Mac, the OS X Server logo, and something called the "Happy Foot" that even after looking at it I still can't figure out what the hell it is...

[CharlesS]

Okay - I've decided to post my findings in here anyway. They might be helpful to people who want to put the old Happy Mac in instead of the Apple logo, or maybe someone can figure out what the hell the Happy Foot is for...

Here we go. These offsets are all from the BootX file in Mac OS X 10.1.5. I don't know if it's different for earlier versions of 10.1.

Happy Mac: offset 18CC2, 000440h bytes 32x34 pixels
Happy Foot: offset 19102, 00078h bytes, 10x12 pixels
And the colors for both of these: offset 13E4E, 000300h bytes

In both cases, the sizes are given with the width first, height second.

Someone got the pinwheel and the glory; I got the Happy Foot. Oh well, that's life, I guess.

[edit: I had the happy mac data labeled as "Happy Foot" and vice versa. D'oh!]

[Marshall]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Hmm.. ok, so if I want to change the background color, would I simply have to do it manually via the text or does Photoshop have a color table modifier?

If all you want to change is the background color, you can just change it in the hex editor, but chances are the image won't look right on it.

Photoshop has a color table editor built into it (Image > Mode > Color Table), but the trick is getting your image to have the background color in a specific slot. Here's what I did:

1. Create the 128x128 24-bit image, composited on a solid background.
2. Choose Image > Mode > Indexed Color, reducing the image to 256 colors.
3. Choose Image > Mode > Color Table, and find the background color. Swap it with the second color in the table (editing the color values for each), which is what BootX uses for the background.
4. Press "Save" to get the .ACT file whose contents will be pasted into BootX.
5. Press "Cancel" so that your image doesn't get its colors messed up from this new palette.
6. Choose Edit > Undo Indexed Color to restore your image to RGB.
7. Choose Image > Mode > Indexed Color, and this time choose "Custom" from the Palette drop-down. Load the palette that you saved in step 4.

This will get you a 256-color image that is mapped to the correct palette.

Bear in mind that all this is from memory when I tried it last week on a test machine at work -- I'll check tomorrow to make sure.

[Gene Jockey]

Well, chris_h got me going on this...I couldn't get the full size image to work, but I made this 128x128 version...



Here is the raw file and CLUT file. The CLUT opens to a length of 306 in HexEdit, I just used the first 300 and that seemed to work. Looks pretty nice, I think. Enjoy, if you want...

--Josh

[mrtew]

Cool! Can some lefty make a left handed cursor and post it with complete insructions as to how to install it? This is what I have been waiting for, for almost two years now. How am I supposed to operate a right handed computer with my left hand. [/why doesn't Apple think of this stuff_

[Gene Jockey]

Originally posted by mrtew:
Cool! Can some lefty make a left handed cursor and post it with complete insructions as to how to install it? This is what I have been waiting for, for almost two years now. How am I supposed to operate a right handed computer with my left hand. [/why doesn't Apple think of this stuff_

Done.

I just followed the instructions on the Japanese page, really.

Bad news...changing the cursor doesn't change the focus point of the cursor. The focus of the cursor is still where the tip of the right-facing arrow would have been...so that's pretty lame. If anyone wants to check, here's the changed CoreGraphics file:

CoreGraphics.sit

It replaces the file at /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/

Hopefully this is kosher with Apple legal...

--J

Edit: After replacing the file, log out to change the cursor, no need to reboot. FYI.

[fetopher]

So when we are talking about changing the background color of BootX by changingthe second color in the palette, are we talking about the background that covers the whole screen? Or just the background for the 128x128 pixel image? If its the whole background, can I change it to match the color of the login/boot screen (aqua blue)? If so, can I change the 128x128 image to have the same background?

So far I've been able to change the image, but only a semi boring 256 levels of gray, on a gray background.
Thanks