biswa@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Biswa Ghosh) (12/19/90)
Hi Folks, Previously I had inquired about hacking the "Welcome to Macintosh" message to one of my own liking. I had posted a summary, in which I said that it is possible to change the message to a new one, provided it is no longer than the old one. Well, *I was wrong*, you can change it to any (reasonable) length you want. Thanks once again to Lawrence D'Oliveiro, for helping me figure this one out. *Warning* - It may be a Bad Thing to hack your system file and you may have crashes, typhoons, tornadoes, etc. if you do so. If you do make any of the changes listed below, you do so at your own risk, I assume no responsibility, blah, blah, blah... These changes should be attempted on a COPY OF your system file, not on the original. I recommend putting the copy on a floppy, and booting off the floppy to see if the changes worked, before putting the modified system file onto your hard disk. Of course, you probably knew all that. The welcome message is stored as a DSAT resource, which you can modify with ResEdit. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a template, so you have to hack it in hex. The message is a text item, stored in this format: Value item ID (word) 0032 length of rest of definition (word) 001A location of text - y coord. (word) 006C location of text - x coord. (word) 00C0 characters of text (n ASCII bytes, no slashes allowed!) 5765 This part spells out "Welcome to ..." 6C63 etc. null indicating end of text (byte) 0000 So if you want to increase the length of the text (moving along the following items, and increasing the length of the entire resource), then you can insert your new text, but also you must update the length of definition part. So if you increase the message by 4 characters, then the length, 001A should be replaced with 001E. I increased the message by an even number of characters only, so that the word boundaries don't get messed up. Maybe it doesn't matter, but I don't know. I also changed the x-location of the message so that it is now nice and centered above the Macsbug Installed message, whereas before it was left justified. All this was done on an SE/30 running system 6.0.4. Your mileage may vary. Biswa Ghosh 550 Cory Hall arpa: biswa@janus.berkeley.edu U.C. Berkeley uucp: ...ucbvax!janus!biswa Berkeley, CA 94720 tel: (415) 642-0395