Making of FF7 Theme

Wallpaper

The following tricks can be used to turn a 256-color image into a TRUE color optimized image.

First you need to use applications like Photo Paint or Photo Shop. You need to use at least the "blur" and "sharpen" functions(if you want some special effects you need more). Please note the following things:

• Do not include borders or outlines when blurring.
• Try not to blur a large area at once. Do it part by part.
• When an area is over-blurred, use sharpening.
• You can also use sharpening to make the border clearer.
• Proper sharpening can also be used to create metal-like effect

The resulting optimized image will look MUCH BETTER than the original 256-color image! See the below comparisons.

Before processing

After processing

Icons

Making icon is easy. You may not even need to have an icon-making program. All you need is a software that can handle optimized palette(8-bit). It is always better to use softwares decicated to making icons, of course

First, scale down the pics to a smaller dimension that fit the icon(48x48 in my case). Then turn it to a paletted 8-bit image. There is a trick here. You should turn it to a 254 colors image, and then add WHITE(255,255,255) and BLACK(0,0,0) manually. Add a transparent color if necessary.

Cursors

Making animated cursor is a little bit more difficult(quite time consuming), although it is somewhat like making icon(but you need to process multiple frames instead of just one for icon). You must have a program that can make animated cursor. It will be better if have a software that can handle customized 8-bit palette as well. Turn the image to a scale-down 8-bit paletted image. You also need to use the 254 colors trick.

You can download an icon/cursor making software called Microangelo from here.

This is the "shortest" cursor I've made. All others are longer than this one(the longest animation lasts 15 seconds!!).

If you can't read Japanese, click here and read the instructions.

Many people have been asking me how to use the program. Practically you must register it before you can actually use it. However, if you must use it immediately, you can find the way(s) by searching through the news groups(use search engine). Use "psxvideo" as the key word, and find those posts in Hong Kong news group......

Ok I was bad enough. Please ask me no more about this matter.

Sound

Making sound theme is nothing special. All you need is to have a recording source(directly from Playstation or from CD sound tracks), and a recording program. Since you can't make too large a wave file for the sound event, you will certainly need a program to cut the wave and add some special effects to improve the sound quality and reduce size. Here is a good program that can be used for wave editing. To further reduce size, make sure the wave is compressed in Microsoft ADPCM when used as a sound event.

Startup and Shutdown pics

This is perhaps the easiest. Just turn your source file into a 320x400 optimized 256 colors bitmap and rename it as logo.sys and put it in the root directory. You can also name it as logos.sys or logow.sys and put it in the Windows directory to use them as shutdown/waiting pics.

If you want to make the startup pic animated, go to this site for more information.

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