If I were to guess (not that I’m an expert in any way) it’s probably related to memory and storage constraints. That includes the install media: Windows 98 was still available on floppy disk, albeit in a slightly stripped down version. Windows 95 could run on as little as 4MB of memory, and MS-DOS was still used for bootstrapping the OS (and did a lot more besides). I think that means that, at least during the initial OS boot, you ALSO had to deal with the memory limits of MS-DOS without HI-MEM which meant you had even less space to work with (1 MB). Given those constraints, and how small/slow hard drives were back then, compressing everything as much as possible makes sense.
That sounds reasonable. I even noticed that in the first passes of my compressor, when it was compressing inefficiently, sometimes only part of the bitmap would show up, presumably because the whole thing wouldn't fit in memory. That would also explain why they didn't just keep using the standard BMP RLE, it may not have been good enough. That being said, why _only_ the bitmap? Maybe they were afraid decompressing would be too taxing on the CPU? Or the DOS code needed to be uncompressed until DOS 8 in ME?
Fyi, Microsoft publishes this stuff in there Dev and OEM documentation and sell tools to easy manipulate it. Not really a secret. Just most people don't care enough to look it up.
that bit mentioning about "just shoving all sorts of dll and exe file into Resource Hacker", THAT'S SO MEEEE WHEN I WERE YOUNG YOU NAILED IT SO HARD XDDDDDDDDD
I remember that at some point I was modding Windows (the famous unattended editions) when I was like, idk, 7 or 8 years old, in the XP/Vista era, unsupervised on the internet. Didn't end up going into IT/programming until 2 years ago, but this made me learn a loooot about design *and* Windows internals knowledge. Fucking around and finding around is the best way to learn new stuff and I wish everyone had the chance to do this. It's the single best way to have life-long skills. Fun fact: the newer versions of Windows store the spinner in a font. And it's used a lot throughout. A very good way to save resources and make it fancy.
So true. And to get more money in Sims I would open GameHack, search for the value of simleons, buy something, check for the new value and change it to a million. Life was so easy before memory protection and boundary checking :D
I hate this "trade secret" nonsense lmao, like at that point it just sounds like the person is lying about it. If they were selling custom boot screens, then they probably would've just advertised their own page selling the access. If they knew, they'd explain how to do it. Saying "I know how to do it, but I'm not gonna tell" is just a lie
@@bounceysteve Maybe you're right. It could still be ADHD. I know that I can get hyperfixated on mundane things sometimes and produce content like this. But it's very rare and few and far between.
You are a great narrator, to the point where you basically managed to keep me entertained with essencially just an unedited desktop with a few graphics done in paint (lol). I hope you do more stuff like this, it was really fun! My only pet peeve about this video's editing is that the music you chose just randomly fades in and sometimes doesn't quite fit the moment, but some admittedly did fit good for the big reveal moment.
It's so weird that you decided to reverse all the boot screen formats directly in a straight way like it was in the early 00s instead of using Ghidra or some other RE software. So much patience and stuff, cool, I love it so much!
If I actually knew the first thing about RE this video would have been much different..! This is just me stumbling around with the little technical knowledge I have and running into a lot of small miracles to figure things out.
@berylrose2270 That honestly makes the video more interesting to me. Ghidra's awesome, but getting to see someone pick apart software by hand always makes me more invested in the video.
There were tools for Windows XP that allowed you to customize your boot screen. The programs were called "Boot Screen"/"Boot Skin" and "Boot Editor". Allowed you to change where the progress bar was and stuff. Quite a community for it too.
@@TheSoundCrafterCompanyI maybe wrong, but by observation it seems what Bootskin does is that it loads itself during boot time and puts the skin "on top" of the regular XP boot screen, because on slower systems you can see the original boot screen for a few seconds before it gets changed.
I'm speechless That's amazing, you're a gem Something super precious I love everything about it, searching, finding, modifying, and your art that you seem to make so quickly. everything I can't do with my work that takes up 90% of me Wait... is that love I feel? I'm in love with what you've done! I love the music and the way you explain it, it feels like you didn't follow a script and the way it's done is just the way it looks. You could say you followed an anti-script, make it and see
I'm happy There's always room to be a nerd on the internet It took me 2 days to watch your video, it's dense with information, I watched it in a few parts
I only now noticed this was uploaded 1 day ago and from a channel with almost 900 subs. I am now one of them, this is so underrated. Keep up the good work
You should ABSOLUTELY make a discord server btw I'd love to have a place where i can yap about both art and stuff like older operating systems. Unless you have one and i'm just blind
26:07 YESSSSS I'M SO GLAD WE'RE DOING THIS!!! loving this journey so far, i really appreciate how you guide us through so we can actually follow the logic. makes it feel like i'm figuring this stuff out with you :] also the dragons are cute :D
during the windows me segment i was literally thinking "ooh i wonder if this decompression thing could work on 95/98?" AND THEN WE CIRCLED BACK FOR REAL
Este tiene que ser el video sobre versiones antiguas de Windows más interesantes que he visto en tanto tiempo. Volver a sentir esa sensación de aprender algo nuevo en cada minuto es increible. Buen video!
Wow, I clicked on this purely because reading such a title and seeing the video length I felt obligated to do so, not thinking I'd actually be interested enough to watch the whole thing.. But it turned out to be a goddamn journey! This was so fucking cool I loved every second of it
Honestly this is one of the best videos on windows I’ve seen in a long time. The documentation you’ve done was extremely well done, and it may help the windows modding community. Thanks a lot for this tutorial, you earned my full respect.
Dang, you’re gaining subscribers fast because of this video! I mean, it’s pretty well edited, and the music sounds good, so you’re doing something right and the algorithm is praising you!
The absolute wizardry I witnessed when you opened calc in word and resized it to see the icon... Man everything in this vid is just so cool! And bravo for not only figuring out the 95/98 logo decryption, but taking the time to reverse engineer a re-encryption tool! ^,=,^
as a kid I just used stardock bootskin for xp. This was such an awesome watch. nothing I cant say that others haven't. I do have to comment on how great your taste in music is. an hour and 12 minutes well spent.
Very interesting video! I'm a Linux guy and thought there's no way I'm watching the an entire hour-long video about Windows. More than an hour later and I'm glad I did. Great job!
Yo I love your Shit! Lovely how this video is full of educated guesses :3 Currently done with the first Windows Version and I already Love the Video, gonna love Watching the rest!
I'm so glad I found this video. The premise was intriguing and your artwork was a joy to look at. I didn't even notice it was an hour long before I was almost done watching!
A few hours later, I remembered that the most recent versions of Windows can get the startup logo from the system firmware on modern machines, meaning parts of the startup graphics may be replaced without breaking Windows security. It just involves modding my UEFI instead... I can't help but be tempted to try it, despite the less-than-zero chance that I might nuke my motherboard in the process.
This might be one of the most fascinating videos i've watched on this platform. It was so intriguing to see how different versions of Windows handles these boot screens and how you can use it to your advantage by replacing it. It was surprisingly fun to watch, everything was delivered so clearly even for a person that doesn't know much about the details, and your voice is so calming that it's a pleasure listening to your ramblings about techy beep-boop stuff ❤ It's actually insane how much effort you made to something that's so niche that most of the people wouldn't even consider doing, especially in the earlier versions of Windows. Like come on, why would anyone even want to change the boot screen for Windows 1.01? Or to write a decompressor AND A COMPRESSOR for something that you didn't need to do in the first place??? Also, I checked out some of your other stuff and your website, and damn, not only you know a thing about tech AND drawing, but you also WRITE NOVELS? It's actually mind-blowing how talented you are that it's honestly making me jealous lol Real talk though, keep up the good work, and best of luck to you in the future! And if you're still interested in making videos that explain in detail certain things about tech, I'm definitely going to check back on you! ❤ also i genuinely burst out laughing at the windows gangster edition reference this was constantly running in my head throughout this video and i was sure you weren't aware i love you so much for that
What a cool video! Really great job on it all. I too would browse the Windows folder on XP when I was a kid, so you had me hooked right from the beginning!
Don't know what UA-cam was smoking when it recommended this awesome video to me, but I believe it should share some of that stuff with the rest of us. Excellent video, really enjoyed it. Very interesting to watch, learned a whole bunch of things I didn't know and your style and presentation is very compelling.
That was like the coolest thing I've watched on UA-cam in a few months. :D Wouldn't have thought that I could be hooked on a 1h video about the bootscreens in Windows, but hey here I am :D
I'm also the same kind of nerd that I'm interested by those unimportant bits of knowledge, so I enjoyed the entire video a lot (and it takes a lot for me to commit to a video longer than 10 minutes). Good job.
Windows 2000 has a pixel that controls the background color behind the boot screen leftover from the Beta when the boot screen was 320x240. It still supports a 320x240 bitmap like the beta and the position of where the banner scrolls and the progress bar need to be edited with a hex editor to match the beta. Windows XP pre-SP2 builds have edition ID overlays that appear underneath the main logo that need to be edited to match the new bootscreen too.
This video was genuinely INCREDIBLY interesting to look at with all this info being discovered etc, the constant presence of scalies and banger music in the background made it 10 times better tho LMAO
Really great video. I always love figuring out how tech stuff works under the hood and breaking and rebuilding it in my own image. Please do more of these windows videos
this is the perfect video Beautiful thumbnail Fun concept Technically dense but easily understandable Excellent pacing The writing is like I’m talking to a friend Music to compliment each milestone Audio mixed well Very cool hand drawn art This is what youtube was made for o7
Incredible video, totally compelling the whole way through and wonderfully presented with just the right mix of detail and humour. Really appreciate the effort in making this, I hope to see more from you! :)
I love this video. This brought back some nostalgia for me too, especially as I always wondered back when I was younger how to replace the XP bootscreen. When you mentioned Resource Hacker and you ran through the bitmaps and dialogs for each program I genuinely got so excited! Used to do this same exact thing back then, especially when transforming XP into a different OS (like 2000 or Vista) Genuinely great job on this video. Bravo. (Edit: I love your scalies too! So adorable!)
8:25 This is the same feeling i get from the original 1950s 'The Thing' movie, when they are all gathered around the ufo in the ice and the camera goes farther out and you see the outline forms a perfect circle, its like your reading the Microsoft tea leaves, pure gold
I really enjoyed this video and the screensaver video! I’d love to see more like it. Nice job man :)
29 днів тому+2
Hey, great adventure diving into different Windows boot screen formats, and amazing art (especially Win95 and Win2k)! Also nice of you to comment and publish the IO7 decompression tool.
42:00 i dont need sleep. I need answers. 55:00 I knew the image was black because it has a fade-in animation, and thanks to watchung a lot of coding secrets videos, i know you can make quite good animations just by changing the colour palette. 55:42 and it does exactly what i thought. it overwrites the image's colour table with its own.
This was so fun to watch! Great pacing, great explanation and great music. It was a fun adventure following you through the different challenges and to see how you solved them!
( 22:00 ) For those who dont know the cause of this, it's because the image file is "indexed" with the palette. As showed in the video, this means that the image will ONLY have it's original colors, and not other colors outside of the palette. This "indexed" thing is also a feature in art/sprite programs. For example; Aseprite. Hope this helps.
This is SUCH a great video, you clearly know your stuff and it takes me back to trying to change the boot screen myself as a kid, messing up the animation, and just removing the bar to make it look intentional. Keep up the good work, I'll be waiting for more like this 🔥🔥💪
This entire video is unironically pure cinema. This was more entertaining, the story more captivating than many mobies made today. Watching you reverse engineer and hack these boot screens was peak. Great video.
.ico goes hard, and from someone that routinely runs a 95 machine i say hell yeeeeaa sub thing, i would never of had the patience for this, your work is brill
this is super cool!! i always wondered where the bitmaps were stored in those old windows OSs since i was little but i never got around to finding out myself. i especially thought that it was nothing short of mind blowing that you dedicated yourself to write a [de]compressor for 9x's IO.SYS to find the original bitmap. (also cool scalies :))
great video! love to see videos that aren't overedited to hell and back which are still very interesting and good at keeping my attention for a long time
I finally made it through this banger of a video. I learned a lot. Like the fact that I accidently just made a slightly simpler version of the bitmap file format and thought it was original. No but seriously this was really cool, keep up the great work!
About Windows NT 3.1/3.5 Windows NT 3.1/3.5's "boot splash" is used as desktop background (the file name is WINNT.bmp), it means that these operating systems does not have graphical boot screen, only text boot screen
> 42:53 I work at a computer museum and we get a load of school visits, one of the activities they can book onto is coding like it's the 1980s in BASIC. I always try to be positive with people when they are debugging and say "You're making progress! You have a *different* error!" because that's a lot of what hacking around is, just fixing what the compiler is shouting about until the compiler stops shouting, so it's important to emphasise just how important it is that different problems are not disheartening, it shows you are fixing things
This is by far one of the greatest videos I have ever seen on UA-cam. Not only do you figure out where and how these graphics are stored in these not-image files, but you go out of your way to actually decompile them! And with very little documentation that Windows 95 and 98 have on their IO .SYS files, my mind was genuinely blown away when you actually went through the effort to program a toolkit to decompress the Windows 95 and 98 boot screens! Like for real, this video blew my mind at least 4 times throughout! Excellent video! You deserve attention from the Windows community!
The icons and bitmaps are in the resource section of the image executable... It's located at the end of the image and can be modified with a resource editor; e.g. visual studio. The resource will contain the image header so you don't need to worry about palettes. Just replace the image, icon, or even string, version, etc... to that of your choosing.
only partway through the video but thank u so much for making the info about how to compress/decompress the win95/98 boot logos easily available for ppl. we dont know what loew's problem is that he walked into a thread asking for support and basically just mocked the op for having not figured out what he already knew, but its extremely obnoxious and unhelpful and we're always happy to see someone ruin their shitty gatekeeping by making knowledge more accessible.
That was an insane and thoroughly enjoyable watch, thank you for sharing. As a system admin/IT professional I sometimes start to deceive myself into thinking I have a pretty good handle on how this shit generally might work, then people like you come along to humble me as you should. I was able to generally predict how the early Windows stuff was going to work and predicted ahead of time that digital signing was going to cause a problem sooner or later, but the absolute insanity of compressing and decompressing that data? Kudos.
That one Microsoft dev deciding to only compress the bitmap:
I need Raymond Chen to explain why Microsoft would do this to me.
If I were to guess (not that I’m an expert in any way) it’s probably related to memory and storage constraints. That includes the install media: Windows 98 was still available on floppy disk, albeit in a slightly stripped down version.
Windows 95 could run on as little as 4MB of memory, and MS-DOS was still used for bootstrapping the OS (and did a lot more besides). I think that means that, at least during the initial OS boot, you ALSO had to deal with the memory limits of MS-DOS without HI-MEM which meant you had even less space to work with (1 MB). Given those constraints, and how small/slow hard drives were back then, compressing everything as much as possible makes sense.
That sounds reasonable. I even noticed that in the first passes of my compressor, when it was compressing inefficiently, sometimes only part of the bitmap would show up, presumably because the whole thing wouldn't fit in memory. That would also explain why they didn't just keep using the standard BMP RLE, it may not have been good enough.
That being said, why _only_ the bitmap? Maybe they were afraid decompressing would be too taxing on the CPU? Or the DOS code needed to be uncompressed until DOS 8 in ME?
@@berylrose2270 windows 7 is animation bmp long vertical image.
i swear the world is trying to tell me subtly to rejoin wysd
istg i find people from that damned server literately everywhere
Excellent story, well told. I was hooked from start to finish. RIP to Rudolph's "trade secrets".
Fyi, Microsoft publishes this stuff in there Dev and OEM documentation and sell tools to easy manipulate it. Not really a secret. Just most people don't care enough to look it up.
Screw that guy, how childish and unreasonable
@@derivativeoflog7good news, i found out that he's actually dead
@@derivativeoflog7 Wouldn't surprise me if they were just lying that they knew it.
@@lucidmoses pretty sure the oem ones are for logo.sys not io.sys
THANK YOU
I love old tech
I love scalies
This is triggering my obsessions
I LOVE IT
same :3
Same here too :33
omg samee
Same!
Exactly, best of all worlds!
that bit mentioning about "just shoving all sorts of dll and exe file into Resource Hacker", THAT'S SO MEEEE WHEN I WERE YOUNG YOU NAILED IT SO HARD XDDDDDDDDD
Ah yes the early reverse engineering days
I remember that at some point I was modding Windows (the famous unattended editions) when I was like, idk, 7 or 8 years old, in the XP/Vista era, unsupervised on the internet. Didn't end up going into IT/programming until 2 years ago, but this made me learn a loooot about design *and* Windows internals knowledge.
Fucking around and finding around is the best way to learn new stuff and I wish everyone had the chance to do this. It's the single best way to have life-long skills.
Fun fact: the newer versions of Windows store the spinner in a font. And it's used a lot throughout. A very good way to save resources and make it fancy.
@@framebufferswindows’ spinner font is actually the best optimised loading spinner in like all OSes, can’t say the same for the rest of Windows though
So true. And to get more money in Sims I would open GameHack, search for the value of simleons, buy something, check for the new value and change it to a million. Life was so easy before memory protection and boundary checking :D
Excellent work, especially the Win9x part.
Those guys with their trade secrets thought they're smarter than everybody else but they're not.
I hate this "trade secret" nonsense lmao, like at that point it just sounds like the person is lying about it. If they were selling custom boot screens, then they probably would've just advertised their own page selling the access. If they knew, they'd explain how to do it.
Saying "I know how to do it, but I'm not gonna tell" is just a lie
Came for Windows, stayed for scalie creatures.
BASED BASED BASED. you're so cool
real
Ye
i have no clue how i would get your level of hyperfixation, bravo
I know, right? It's like some sort of superpower that normies have. My ADHD-riddled brain cannot comprehend this level of dedication.
Psythik I don't think this person is neuronormal (compliment)
@@bounceysteve Maybe you're right. It could still be ADHD. I know that I can get hyperfixated on mundane things sometimes and produce content like this. But it's very rare and few and far between.
Psythik I meant more like autism
Psythik I was thinking more on the side of the spectrum when I said the comment, ADHD could play a part in it though
That early Windows interlaced slide in effect is pretty dope.
You are a great narrator, to the point where you basically managed to keep me entertained with essencially just an unedited desktop with a few graphics done in paint (lol). I hope you do more stuff like this, it was really fun! My only pet peeve about this video's editing is that the music you chose just randomly fades in and sometimes doesn't quite fit the moment, but some admittedly did fit good for the big reveal moment.
It's so weird that you decided to reverse all the boot screen formats directly in a straight way like it was in the early 00s instead of using Ghidra or some other RE software. So much patience and stuff, cool, I love it so much!
If I actually knew the first thing about RE this video would have been much different..! This is just me stumbling around with the little technical knowledge I have and running into a lot of small miracles to figure things out.
@berylrose2270 That honestly makes the video more interesting to me. Ghidra's awesome, but getting to see someone pick apart software by hand always makes me more invested in the video.
To be fair, I'd probably do it the same way
@@berylrose2270 reversing the format straight is way more fun anyway :3 its like solving a puzzle
Ghidra is pretty overkill for what he's doing. I even think it would make his job harder.
Great video! Hope Rlow got a lot out of his "trade secret" lol. What a beautiful journey
Total dick for that by the way
It's 5am and I've spent an hour watching this man modify Windows boot screens. And I don't regret anything.
There were tools for Windows XP that allowed you to customize your boot screen. The programs were called "Boot Screen"/"Boot Skin" and "Boot Editor". Allowed you to change where the progress bar was and stuff. Quite a community for it too.
Bootskin doesn't work for me for some reason.
For me it was Boot Editor which was quite iffy.
@@ThatBritishSnep wdym iffy?
@@TheSoundCrafterCompany Just really uncertain wherever it was gonna work or not.
@@TheSoundCrafterCompanyI maybe wrong, but by observation it seems what Bootskin does is that it loads itself during boot time and puts the skin "on top" of the regular XP boot screen, because on slower systems you can see the original boot screen for a few seconds before it gets changed.
The Virtual machine reports that the guest OS supports mouse pointer integration
Fffffff.....
gd payer
oh hi
@@WolfieMar WÖLFERSÖN MAR
love the dragon artworks, and no I didnt fell asleep :)
I'm speechless
That's amazing, you're a gem
Something super precious
I love everything about it, searching, finding, modifying, and your art that you seem to make so quickly.
everything I can't do with my work that takes up 90% of me
Wait... is that love I feel? I'm in love with what you've done!
I love the music and the way you explain it, it feels like you didn't follow a script and the way it's done is just the way it looks.
You could say you followed an anti-script, make it and see
I'm happy
There's always room to be a nerd on the internet
It took me 2 days to watch your video, it's dense with information, I watched it in a few parts
The IO7 decompression you got working is cool af, props to you man
34:03 A Man Tried To Modify His Windows Install. This Is What Happened To His Computer.
I immediately looked for a Chubbyemu comment the moment I heard that music, and I'm not disappointed
A Prince Polo ad appeared.
@@maya20484 Dustforce music
I only now noticed this was uploaded 1 day ago and from a channel with almost 900 subs. I am now one of them, this is so underrated. Keep up the good work
You should ABSOLUTELY make a discord server btw I'd love to have a place where i can yap about both art and stuff like older operating systems. Unless you have one and i'm just blind
I do have one! discord.com/invite/X5SuQTb
@@berylrose2270 So i was blind, thanks lmao
Micropenis 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I absolutely ADORE your scalies, they're so adorable! You should take on custom bootscreen commissions! Hahaha
dude that would be insane if someone, or even he, actually did something like that, i would buy that
26:07 YESSSSS I'M SO GLAD WE'RE DOING THIS!!! loving this journey so far, i really appreciate how you guide us through so we can actually follow the logic. makes it feel like i'm figuring this stuff out with you :]
also the dragons are cute :D
during the windows me segment i was literally thinking "ooh i wonder if this decompression thing could work on 95/98?" AND THEN WE CIRCLED BACK FOR REAL
I dont know why but on top of a very well made and edited video, your boot screen drawings filled me with a lot of joy. Thank you ^^
Este tiene que ser el video sobre versiones antiguas de Windows más interesantes que he visto en tanto tiempo. Volver a sentir esa sensación de aprender algo nuevo en cada minuto es increible.
Buen video!
Loved it. I never thought I would sit for an hour watching someone explain how the windows boot screen is stored lol
Wow, I clicked on this purely because reading such a title and seeing the video length I felt obligated to do so, not thinking I'd actually be interested enough to watch the whole thing.. But it turned out to be a goddamn journey! This was so fucking cool I loved every second of it
10:00 THE "FUCK OFF" dude like 💀
Honestly this is one of the best videos on windows I’ve seen in a long time. The documentation you’ve done was extremely well done, and it may help the windows modding community. Thanks a lot for this tutorial, you earned my full respect.
Dang, you’re gaining subscribers fast because of this video! I mean, it’s pretty well edited, and the music sounds good, so you’re doing something right and the algorithm is praising you!
The absolute wizardry I witnessed when you opened calc in word and resized it to see the icon...
Man everything in this vid is just so cool!
And bravo for not only figuring out the 95/98 logo decryption, but taking the time to reverse engineer a re-encryption tool! ^,=,^
as a kid I just used stardock bootskin for xp. This was such an awesome watch. nothing I cant say that others haven't. I do have to comment on how great your taste in music is. an hour and 12 minutes well spent.
Very interesting video! I'm a Linux guy and thought there's no way I'm watching the an entire hour-long video about Windows. More than an hour later and I'm glad I did. Great job!
Great video man. It's kinda rare to find actually good content nowadays and it's feeding me hyperfixations
Yo I love your Shit!
Lovely how this video is full of educated guesses :3
Currently done with the first Windows Version and I already Love the Video, gonna love Watching the rest!
Proto :3
I'm so glad I found this video. The premise was intriguing and your artwork was a joy to look at. I didn't even notice it was an hour long before I was almost done watching!
A few hours later, I remembered that the most recent versions of Windows can get the startup logo from the system firmware on modern machines, meaning parts of the startup graphics may be replaced without breaking Windows security. It just involves modding my UEFI instead... I can't help but be tempted to try it, despite the less-than-zero chance that I might nuke my motherboard in the process.
your vibes hit, I love the music, the art, the story of your journey through all the versions. Thank you for sharing your fun with the world.
This might be one of the most fascinating videos i've watched on this platform. It was so intriguing to see how different versions of Windows handles these boot screens and how you can use it to your advantage by replacing it. It was surprisingly fun to watch, everything was delivered so clearly even for a person that doesn't know much about the details, and your voice is so calming that it's a pleasure listening to your ramblings about techy beep-boop stuff ❤
It's actually insane how much effort you made to something that's so niche that most of the people wouldn't even consider doing, especially in the earlier versions of Windows. Like come on, why would anyone even want to change the boot screen for Windows 1.01? Or to write a decompressor AND A COMPRESSOR for something that you didn't need to do in the first place???
Also, I checked out some of your other stuff and your website, and damn, not only you know a thing about tech AND drawing, but you also WRITE NOVELS? It's actually mind-blowing how talented you are that it's honestly making me jealous lol
Real talk though, keep up the good work, and best of luck to you in the future!
And if you're still interested in making videos that explain in detail certain things about tech, I'm definitely going to check back on you!
❤
also i genuinely burst out laughing at the windows gangster edition reference this was constantly running in my head throughout this video and i was sure you weren't aware
i love you so much for that
What a cool video! Really great job on it all. I too would browse the Windows folder on XP when I was a kid, so you had me hooked right from the beginning!
Never ever have i known that bitmap has this deep lore. Nice video, had me hooked for an hour
Don't know what UA-cam was smoking when it recommended this awesome video to me, but I believe it should share some of that stuff with the rest of us.
Excellent video, really enjoyed it. Very interesting to watch, learned a whole bunch of things I didn't know and your style and presentation is very compelling.
That was like the coolest thing I've watched on UA-cam in a few months. :D Wouldn't have thought that I could be hooked on a 1h video about the bootscreens in Windows, but hey here I am :D
I'm also the same kind of nerd that I'm interested by those unimportant bits of knowledge, so I enjoyed the entire video a lot (and it takes a lot for me to commit to a video longer than 10 minutes). Good job.
Just stumbling onto your channel and I just love your art work. Was a blast going to your website!
Dude!!!! Just finished watching while stoned, so much nostalgia for those versions of windows. As a programmer, good work
So much work and love into this one, thank you so much for sharing!! This was nice to watch
Windows 2000 has a pixel that controls the background color behind the boot screen leftover from the Beta when the boot screen was 320x240. It still supports a 320x240 bitmap like the beta and the position of where the banner scrolls and the progress bar need to be edited with a hex editor to match the beta. Windows XP pre-SP2 builds have edition ID overlays that appear underneath the main logo that need to be edited to match the new bootscreen too.
Dude I love your reptiles ong
The nostalgia of looking at all the files in system32 and putting them in RH is great
This video was genuinely INCREDIBLY interesting to look at with all this info being discovered etc, the constant presence of scalies and banger music in the background made it 10 times better tho LMAO
Really great video. I always love figuring out how tech stuff works under the hood and breaking and rebuilding it in my own image. Please do more of these windows videos
You got me giggling like a girl everytime you did something that worked. Great video!!! You deserve more views
this is the perfect video
Beautiful thumbnail
Fun concept
Technically dense but easily understandable
Excellent pacing
The writing is like I’m talking to a friend
Music to compliment each milestone
Audio mixed well
Very cool hand drawn art
This is what youtube was made for
o7
You’re doing research that deserves a Nobel prize!
Incredible video, totally compelling the whole way through and wonderfully presented with just the right mix of detail and humour. Really appreciate the effort in making this, I hope to see more from you! :)
What a surprisingly entertaining video for how lack of editing or hyperactivity there is. I love it!!!
loved this start to finish looking forward to watching more of your videos.
Now this is some delicious computer content. Props to the recommended tab and to you, Beryl.
I love this video. This brought back some nostalgia for me too, especially as I always wondered back when I was younger how to replace the XP bootscreen.
When you mentioned Resource Hacker and you ran through the bitmaps and dialogs for each program I genuinely got so excited! Used to do this same exact thing back then, especially when transforming XP into a different OS (like 2000 or Vista)
Genuinely great job on this video. Bravo.
(Edit: I love your scalies too! So adorable!)
8:25 This is the same feeling i get from the original 1950s 'The Thing' movie, when they are all gathered around the ufo in the ice and the camera goes farther out and you see the outline forms a perfect circle, its like your reading the Microsoft tea leaves, pure gold
I really enjoyed this video and the screensaver video! I’d love to see more like it. Nice job man :)
Hey, great adventure diving into different Windows boot screen formats, and amazing art (especially Win95 and Win2k)! Also nice of you to comment and publish the IO7 decompression tool.
42:00 i dont need sleep. I need answers.
55:00 I knew the image was black because it has a fade-in animation, and thanks to watchung a lot of coding secrets videos, i know you can make quite good animations just by changing the colour palette.
55:42 and it does exactly what i thought. it overwrites the image's colour table with its own.
DUDE I CANT BELIEVE I HAVENT SEEN YOUR CHANNEL BEFORE I LOVE OLD TECH!!!
This was so fun to watch! Great pacing, great explanation and great music. It was a fun adventure following you through the different challenges and to see how you solved them!
this is a really good video. i'm really liking your video essay-ish videos
( 22:00 ) For those who dont know the cause of this, it's because the image file is "indexed" with the palette. As showed in the video, this means that the image will ONLY have it's original colors, and not other colors outside of the palette.
This "indexed" thing is also a feature in art/sprite programs. For example; Aseprite.
Hope this helps.
This is SUCH a great video, you clearly know your stuff and it takes me back to trying to change the boot screen myself as a kid, messing up the animation, and just removing the bar to make it look intentional. Keep up the good work, I'll be waiting for more like this 🔥🔥💪
This is a very well made video.
This entire video is unironically pure cinema. This was more entertaining, the story more captivating than many mobies made today. Watching you reverse engineer and hack these boot screens was peak. Great video.
.ico goes hard, and from someone that routinely runs a 95 machine i say hell yeeeeaa
sub thing, i would never of had the patience for this, your work is brill
*would never have
this is super cool!! i always wondered where the bitmaps were stored in those old windows OSs since i was little but i never got around to finding out myself. i especially thought that it was nothing short of mind blowing that you dedicated yourself to write a [de]compressor for 9x's IO.SYS to find the original bitmap.
(also cool scalies :))
Great video, and amazing artwork, great creature design. Definitely gonna mess around with the boot screens on my old machines!
instant subscrib
14:09 I literally squealed out loud "Ouh that's cute!"
great video! love to see videos that aren't overedited to hell and back which are still very interesting and good at keeping my attention for a long time
What a amazing video! It was a pleasure to learn something about this stuff. Congratulation for your accomplishments!
wow i never imagined that id be possible to spot these graphics thru opening it as text like that, seriously cool
I finally made it through this banger of a video. I learned a lot. Like the fact that I accidently just made a slightly simpler version of the bitmap file format and thought it was original.
No but seriously this was really cool, keep up the great work!
never thought I would watch an hour long video about the windows boot screen. great vid.
Very good presentation and break down of technical concepts. (And thank you for sharing and open sourcing your work on the 9X decompressor)
About Windows NT 3.1/3.5
Windows NT 3.1/3.5's "boot splash" is used as desktop background (the file name is WINNT.bmp), it means that these operating systems does not have graphical boot screen, only text boot screen
This was an amazing video! Well edited and entretaining. Managed to keep me hooked to it. (Also clicked because of the scalies)
Kudos to you! Like others, I was hooked on your video..., and I didn't fall asleep either! : )
Sir, you just gained yourself a new subscriber. Loved every single minute of this and really liked your art! Gj
All hail Resource Hacker
> 42:53
I work at a computer museum and we get a load of school visits, one of the activities they can book onto is coding like it's the 1980s in BASIC. I always try to be positive with people when they are debugging and say "You're making progress! You have a *different* error!" because that's a lot of what hacking around is, just fixing what the compiler is shouting about until the compiler stops shouting, so it's important to emphasise just how important it is that different problems are not disheartening, it shows you are fixing things
This was a super fun video. I looooved it. Subscribed!
yo this is perfect!! Now I can figure out exactly how Windows 98 "Unofficial Service Pack 5" screwed up my boot screen and fix it!!
I love the replacement images, and i learned quite a bit
Just took a look at your channel, and i gotta say, that's a pretty nice artstyle you got there!
Went in thinking "no way in heck I will watch a one hour video talking about BOOT SCREENS"... ended up watching the entire thing, whoops
Twice, because I fell asleep the first time lol
This is so impressive, what a wonderfully high effort video
always wanted to make the 3 blue things on the xp loading screen orange honestly
every time i learn something about old windows it just leaves me all the more fascinated about how it works - Very Neat Vid!
awesome video. LOVE. much enjoy the pals & guys in this one
This is by far one of the greatest videos I have ever seen on UA-cam. Not only do you figure out where and how these graphics are stored in these not-image files, but you go out of your way to actually decompile them! And with very little documentation that Windows 95 and 98 have on their IO .SYS files, my mind was genuinely blown away when you actually went through the effort to program a toolkit to decompress the Windows 95 and 98 boot screens! Like for real, this video blew my mind at least 4 times throughout! Excellent video! You deserve attention from the Windows community!
man this is so cool. I have a very very light grasp on what youre talking about but pop off bro. awesomesauce
The icons and bitmaps are in the resource section of the image executable... It's located at the end of the image and can be modified with a resource editor; e.g. visual studio. The resource will contain the image header so you don't need to worry about palettes. Just replace the image, icon, or even string, version, etc... to that of your choosing.
only partway through the video but thank u so much for making the info about how to compress/decompress the win95/98 boot logos easily available for ppl. we dont know what loew's problem is that he walked into a thread asking for support and basically just mocked the op for having not figured out what he already knew, but its extremely obnoxious and unhelpful and we're always happy to see someone ruin their shitty gatekeeping by making knowledge more accessible.
Good grief you are talented. What an interesting journey.
37:54 😭
absolutely miraculous work, btw, both the vid and the topic. please keep doing what you do
That was an insane and thoroughly enjoyable watch, thank you for sharing. As a system admin/IT professional I sometimes start to deceive myself into thinking I have a pretty good handle on how this shit generally might work, then people like you come along to humble me as you should.
I was able to generally predict how the early Windows stuff was going to work and predicted ahead of time that digital signing was going to cause a problem sooner or later, but the absolute insanity of compressing and decompressing that data? Kudos.
this was a pretty cool video to watch :D your website is also really well made btw