I'll get some organization going here later.. but since there's only one thing on my page at the moment, I think it can wait.
Here's something kind of fun.. I took a screen capture of the old Electronic Arts "ECA" logo that used to come up on the screen when some Atari 800XL and C-64 programs were booting up (to be specific, I took a screen capture from the boot-up sequence of M.U.L.E. for the Atari 800XL). Then I set up the palette so that palette rotation would change the colours just as they do/did on the Atari. This is now a fitting boot-up picture for Win98 (it takes Win98 just as long to boot up on my computer as those old games did on my Atari 800XL). It looks a little dull here, just because grey happens to be the first colour in the palette rotation sequence, but it's actually pretty colourful.
320x400 Electronic Arts logo (ready to be used as a boot-up picture)
Note: If you want to download the picture, you're probably going to have to specifically choose the "Save Target As..." option or whatever your browser calls it. Otherwise, some registered program is going to think it knows what to do with a BMP file and things could get ugly.
In case you don't know how to change your boot-up picture, you can copy any 256 colour, 320x400 BMP file to a file called LOGO.SYS in your root directory (in my case, and in the majority of cases, this is C:\LOGO.SYS). This file may or may not exist for you already. If it does not exist, then a default picture is being used from somewhere else (I haven't checked out where the default picture is stored). You can go ahead and copy a file to C:\LOGO.SYS. This file should be detected and used as your boot-up picture.
To control the palette animation, you need to edit your BMP file (eg. with a hex editor) and change the byte at offset: 32hex. The value of this byte should be set to the first colour index in your picture that you want to have involved in the palette rotation. A value of 0 indicates that there will be no palette rotation. The last colour that will be involved in the palette rotation is the last colour in your picture. This means that any colours that you wish to have involved in the palette rotation should be at the end of your 256-colour palette.
"This is
a very exciting time for all of us. AHOAELWAUAWBUP provides a boot-up
picture that will pave the way into the next century and beyond for
small business and anyone who is absolutely bored to hell. It hardly
seems fair." --
Adam's House of Old Animated ECA Logos Which Are Used As Win9x Boot-Up Pictures
Official Spokesperson.