Posts by mihi

You mean column doubling magic, and it is very likely that it does it if the vertical resolution is higher than the horizontal one.

If I recall correclty (don't have a system handy to check it) The startup image was called logo.sys but actually was an uncompressed bitmap format. No need to take any screenshots. The last n (don't remember how many) entries of the Bitmap's palette are rotated during display to create the "progress bar". You could move the progress bar at any position of the image and also make it any shape. When replacing the image, make sure that the colors from the end of the palette are not used anywhere else in the image, or it will be animated as well.

Thank you for the informative article.

However, I'm pretty sure that the startup and shutdown animations on Windows 9x were not in 640x400, but in 320x400 (even more distorted) 256-color mode. Most boot screen viewers therefore stretched the image by 200% to make it look as if it was 640x400.

Reason was that this is the highest possible (undocumented) resolution the original VGA card could handle in 256 color mode, so it worked without extra drivers on all supported machines.

And the link to this comment section in the post is broken