These files are startup screens for Macintosh computers. Although they will work on almost any Macintosh they are designed for use with Mac displays which support a 1280 x 1024 resolution and at least thousands of colours at this resolution. A good candidate for this is a PowerMac 7500 or 8500, with an AppleVision 1710 monitor attached to it's onboard video and 4MB of VRAM installed - the same as I used to create these files, hence the name.
These startup screens will work with any Macintosh or MacOS comatible running System 7 or later (System 6 does not support colour startup screens). With a resolution 
smaller than 1280 x 1024 you will see the central portion of the image, trimmed to fit your screen resolution. With a higher resolution display the image will be centered on the screen, with a grey border filling the unused space. With a display set to fewer than thousands of colours the image will be displayed using colours in the machine's palette closest to the image colours.
They've now been uploaded to Info Mac servers, and so can be found here, here, or on any other Info-Mac ftp server.
To install one of these startup screens simply drag one of the files "StartupScreen" into your System folder. Then each time you restart the selected screen will be loaded at startup and displayed instead of the MacOS startp screen. If you have multiple displays attached to your Mac only the main screen will show an image.
If the startup screen disappers before the startup sequence has finished, and you are using AppleShare/File Sharing, try disabling automatically mounting AppleShare file servers at startup. At least this worked for me when I was having problems.
As all the files have the same name they are placed in individual directories 
named a-h. The directory names correspond to the preview files a.jpeg-h.jpeg in the 'art' directory, which are used in alphabetical order in this documentation. These smaller images were created by QuickTime's preview creator using SimpleText, then converted to JPEG using ResEdit and GifConverter.
Because of the files' format it's difficult to preview the files before you use them. ResEdit, PhotoShop and probbably other programs can open the files: for ResEdit you will need to increase it's memory partition to view the large images in these files, and you may find you need to do the same with other programs. But probably the easiest way to view the images is just to install them as startup screens.
These files were created using the three free programs PowerXplorer, SimpleText and ResEdit. PowerExplorer is by Alessandro Levi Montalcini, SimpleText and ResEdit are by Apple. SimpleText is bundled with all Macs and MacOS releases, while the other two can be found by following the above links.
I ran PowerXplorer with my monitor set to the desired resolution (1280 x 1024) and bit depth (16 bit or thousands of colours), and with PowerXplorer set to 
use the full screen. I then zoomed in to a region of the Mandelbrot set which I thought would make a good image and captured it using the Mac's built in screen capture capability, i.e. by pressing Command-Shift 3.
PowerXplorer's interface made it easy to generate images, while the PowerMac's speed meant each took often only a few seconds, and usually less than a minute to draw. The only flaw in the images generated is the cross hairs cursor, which 
is impossible to hide and so appears in all the images (and can be found in most if you look carefully). It would be possible to remove these with an image retouching program.
These images were saved by the system as PICT files in the startup disk's root directory, called "Picture 1", "Picture 2", etc.. They were then opened with SimpleText, their contents selected using "Select All" and copied to the clipboard using "Copy".
I then launched ReseEdit and a new file, called "StartpScreen", was created. The image copied from SimpleText was pasted into this file, which created a new PICT resource, with a default ID of 128. The PICT picker was opened, so the PICT image preview could be seen, then this was selected and "Get Info" was used on the PICT resource to change the ID to zero.
If you want to try this yourself you only need to follow the above steps, but there are a couple of points to note. First: to create all of these files I needed to increase both SimpleText's and ResEdit's memory partitions to 5MB, as both were unable to copy and paste the largest images with much less memory than this.
Second: probably the most difficult, or least familiar, part of this process is creating the StartupScreen file using ResEdit. To make this easier and speed this up I only followed this proceedure once, after which I used the first file created as a template and pasted the remaining images into copies of it. You could do the same, using one of files I have created as a template.
These files are being distributed as freeware. They may be freely used as startup screens on any Macintosh or MacOS compatible computer. They may be freely uploded to any server or online service, as long as they are distributed together with this documentation. They may not be distributed on any media (e.g. CD-ROM) without my prior express opinion. They come with no express or implied warranty as to their fitness for any purpose.
Any praise or questions to:
John Blackburne
Flat 6, 21st floor
102 - 114 Belecher's Street
Hong Kong
You can send criticism to me as well but it's likely to be ignored - if you don't like what I've done then don't use them or create your own. And I'm unlikely to reply to anything that doesn't arrive by e-mail:
© John Blackburne, johnb@hk.super.net, 29th August 1996
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