poffen@sj.ate.slb.com (Russ Poffenberger) (06/12/90)
A nice feature that is new in Windows 3.0 is the ability to use a color bitmap
(.BMP) picture as a desktop background. The only problem is that the new .BMP
format is created only by the new paintbrush program that comes with windows.
However, you CAN still use those nice gif's you may have around if you convert
the stuff properly. Here is one way to do it.
Get a copy of the GCP program. This is shareware and available from ftp sources
and compuserve. It is a 2.x application, yet it will run under 386 enhanced
mode once you get past the opening warning, or you can run it in real mode.
Once GCP is up, load the gif (or other format it supports) in. The save it as
a PC paintbrush picture (.PCX).
Run Windows paintbrush, and load the .PCX (it reads these too), then write it
back out as a .BMP file.
You can now start the desktop program and specify the name of the .BMP file as
a wallpaper. If the file is significantly smaller than the screen, you can tile
or center the image. If it is close, but not exact, you can shrink or expand
the image while it is loaded in GCP to the size of your screen.
Note: Files that use lots of colors don't appear to come out well, there may
not be enough colors in windows.
Russ Poffenberger DOMAIN: poffen@sj.ate.slb.com
Schlumberger Technologies UUCP: {uunet,decwrl,amdahl}!sjsca4!poffen
1601 Technology Drive CIS: 72401,276
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