Don't box me in...

More work has been done on customizing Windows for this project, and it has become obvious that a decision has to be made regarding the proper aspect ratio (widescreen or square) to use. I really don't want to run one of the many "hack" utilities to change the appearance of Windows, and so far I haven't had to resort to that. After a bit of research, I found an undocumented feature of Windows that allowed me to substitute a still image for the animated "Windows is loading" splash screen. Not having any ideas yet, I plugged in an image I plan to use as the initial power-up logo (the BIOS on the Asus motherboard allows a custom full-screen logo) and it worked quite well.

The problem with both the BIOS logo and the boot screen is that they are limited to 640x480 and 16 colors. That means that when shown on my widescreen TV, the image is stretched to fit. I could set the TV to 4:3 mode, but since my Windows settings are 1360x768 widescreen, I wanted to keep it at 16:9. I was able to compensate for the stretching so the 640x480 image looks normal, but eventually I started to realize that most if not all of the games I plan to play were designed for standard 4:3 displays, and some were even narrower at 3:4 (i.e., vertically-oriented games like PAC-MAN and Donkey Kong). Widescreen, it seems, wouldn't do me a lot of good.

Not wanting to waste the processing power of this machine, and trying to keep the number of computers sitting around to a minimum, I'm planning to press this machine into service as a Home Theater PC as well as a game machine, so it will be necessary for it to be widescreen-friendly. The desktop wallpaper isn't a problem, since it can just be cropped according to the Windows resolution. What can't be adjusted are the BIOS logo and boot screen... if I use images that compensate for the stretching of 16:9 mode, they'd look different when the TV was switched to 4:3 mode for games, etc. They're only shown for a few seconds, but minor details like that really bug me.

Strangely enough, it seems I had already solved my problem without realizing it. I designed the following image as the BIOS power-up logo:



...which at full size was 850x480. Scaled to 640x480, it looks like this:




I had always intended it to be stretched for widescreen, but I later realized that at 4:3, it doesn't look all that strange. Helvetica Neue, the font I used, didn't look funny when squeezed, and the composition of the image left a good balance between graphic elements and white space (or in this case, blue space) in either aspect ratio. Even better, the pine branch and pinecones graphic didn't look terribly deformed at 4:3, since who's to say what shape they're supposed to be?

So... it looks like I have my BIOS logo screen. Now for the boot logo. More to come!