The Customizing Windows 9x Program (Keynote)

The Cube is founded in 2007 by Rudolf Pobiloy or Curtis Muse.









Within Win 95/98, in the root of your (main) drive is a file called logo.sys, which is your startup screen. In your Windows directory are logos.sys and logow.sys, which are your Shutdown and 'Wait till Shutdown' screens. They might not be there, when included in some other file. Placing new files with these names will replace them anyway. You can just rename a bitmap to a .sys file.

If you don't want the logo's to appear, you may open "Msdos.sys" (hidden file at C:\) in Notepad. Add or edit the line "Logo=0" under [Options].

The bitmap has got to be 256 colors ore less, and sized 320 x 400. It will get stretched to fit the screen, so you might start with a 640 x 400 picture, make it look good, then resize it.
You'll notice it's not easy to create a screen that looks good. Got to keep it a bit simple to look good. Good to know is the first color in the palette is what defines the background/border color. The animation is achieved with a palette tweak; complicated, so using one of below utilities is recommended.

There's lot of companies on the web offering 'goodies', like these screens. Just take a look at your favorite games' company.

And there's lot of utilities that do the resizing and/or reducing colordepth and/or renaming. Here's a couple utilities to add some more:
LogoSchemes (free) lets you organize your screens in themes, so you can easily switch sets. Imports .bmp, but doesn't do the resizing and color reduction.
Coolbar Animator (freeware) adds a animated toolbar beneath your picture. The page for it has been down a while now; since the utility is unique and easy find it (hopefully temporarily) here (174 kB).
SpinBmp (freeware) goes a little further and lets you animate any sized & shaped area on the screen, puts even text to animation.
LogoMania (also free) is available from PC Magazine and adds some instant stunning effects.
At XrX they've got another utility to add a bar on your picture (shareware), but mainly there's a large collection of animated screens for download.
You might find a message popping up before login, and the need to click an OK button. Maybe you want to disable it, maybe you want one there. It's controlled by two string values in the registry you can delete/add/modify, at
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.
A value called "LegalNoticeCaption" sets the title of the box, "LegalNoticeText" the message displayed.

Google it for more details.
Link in this website for archive only:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011012025208/http://dave.gasaway.org/software/logoschemes.html
https://web.archive.org/web/19980223022543/http://www.dati.cz/~tomas/coolbar/
https://web.archive.org/web/20000816094927/http://www.qtam-computer.com/
https://web.archive.org/web/20021003175901/http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,26968,00.asp

and Here's a Link for archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121014085944/http://annoyances.org/exec/show/article02-011