Flyakite's 6.0 Pack "adapting" Tips

Some of us on AS board don't use english version of Windows XP. So some people have to "adapt" system files packs to our own needs. And the reason I do it is not only the files' language - I don't like some of the icons in flyakite's pack (it's a matter of taste so I prefer Iceman's icons sometimes).

Replacing icons, bitmaps and avi files is easy, but sometimes there's someting more changed in the files: for instance, in flyakite's pack 6.0 we can see blue grids, graphs and text in taskmgr.exe. I didn't know how it was done and asked flyakite about this. He said he changed the hex values, but unfortunately he didn't send me direct instructions (maybe he was too busy). I changed everything by myself and maybe someone's gonna need it, so here we go.

You'll need the hex editor. I use WinHex.

Okay, now, when you've downloaded the editor, let's get started with replacing. First, we'll replace that ugly green color in text and graphs (00FF00) and some yellow text color (FFFF00) with nice blue one (5A9CF3).

I've made a little table you can use for an easy replacing, because there's a lot of values 00FF00 in the file, but we need to change some of them - not every one.

That's it. Now let's replace the grid color from 008040 to 004C96. There's only two values in the file, but if you're lazy - use the table

Now bitmaps. They're really good in flyakite's pack, but I use brushed visual styles and want to have all the images in brushed, not aqua style. That's how you can make a brushed pattern (if you still don't know it): open Photoshop, create an image of desired resolution and color (#C0C0C0, for example). Now go Filter->Noise->Add Noise... and set amount to 10%. Then go Filter->Blur->Motion Blur... and set angle to 0 and distance to 30 px (you should experiment with values, btw). Now we've got a nice brushed pattern. Reset the colors and choose RGB mode again so you could paste colorful png and stuff: Image->Mode->Grayscale and then Image->Mode->RGB Color.

For example here's my modified shutdown dialog and workstation lock images (nos. 20142 and 101 in msgina.dll):

If someone needs it, feel free to PM me for psd files. Yeah, text is russian, but you can change it