biswa@janus.Berkeley.EDU (Biswa Ghosh) (12/05/90)
Thanks to all of you who have e-mailed and posted information on hacking the introductory "Welcome to Macintosh." message. Here's a summary of what I learned: There are three possible methods to try: 1) The overwhelming majority of people suggested I use a different startup screen altogether, by creating one with Macpaint, saving it as startup screen format in a file called StartupScreen and putting it in the system folder. This method works great, and is the most flexible, since you can make the startup screen into anything you want. 2) Some folks informed me that the welcome message is in fact accessible in Resedit. It is stored as a DSAT resource (which stands for deep-sh*t- something-or-other). Thanks go to Lawrence D'Oliveiro, who was kind enough to post the exact format of the resource, and suggested how to hack it. I tried changing the length of the message as he suggested. This does give the new message at startup, but screws up other things - the drawing of the Mac doesn't show up, nor the box around the text and drawing. I just couldn't get it to work. I guess that changing the message to a larger length is a no-no. This is verified by method 3. 3)Which is, use the utility called IconExchange2.0 (available from sumex). Thanks to Jack (seals@ac.dal.ca) for pointing out this one to me. It allows you to modify the startup icon, startup message, and the bomb message/icon. The new startup message may not be any longer than 21 characters, the same as the original welcome message. So I guess you just can't make it any longer. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work on my SE/30 running system 6.0.4 under multifinder. Maybe it would have worked with unifinder, maybe not. I didn't bother finding out, since I managed to do what I wanted with method 2. So there you have it. Have fun! -Biswa Ghosh