How to add custom icon(s) to later select in Boot Edit menu

[Gary Seven]

Hello all.

This is a rather silly question and definitely not a problem or issue. I just can't figure out how to add additional icons to select from when inside the Boot Item edit menu. There are already some to choose from to identify and dress up a bit one's boot item (there's icons for Windows, Debian, Fedora and others), but I would like to add an icon for Linux Mint.

Now, I get how to create the icon, although I'm unclear which extension it should have (png, ico, etc). But I don't understand HOW to integrate it into my Bootit UEFI program. I read what I could in the manual and came across a subfolder called "graphics" under the "common" folder, and found a "readme" file which just says the following:

Creating your own graphic icon library:
---------------------------------------
You can create up to 56 additional custom 16x16 icons you can use on the boot menu. This is done by using the included ICONLIB.EXE program to maintain a file named ICON16.DAT. ICONLIB.EXE can be run in DOS or Windows x32 environments to add 16x16 GIF files to the library. Once you have your icon library created, you can included it on your BootIt installation disk by placing it in the folder you extracted the BootIt to prior to running makedisk.

Ok, huh? I Googled this file "iconlib.exe" and found almost nothing about it, because this is probably an executable that was used 20 years ago or so. I was looking for command line parameters (switches) to somehow run this program along with my created icon file, but I can't find any information whatsoever. Also, where does this "icon16.dat" file even reside? Is there something I'm missing where this process is simple and I'm just not seeing that?

Thanks to anyone that can shed a little light on what to do here. Thank you!

[TeraByte Support]

iconlib is provided by TeraByte. It's a DOS app which will run in x86 windows and DOS, it will convert the 16x16 .gif to the SPR format needed. There is an internal Win32 version but it doesn't do the gif conversion.

An standard pixel run (SPR) file is nothing more than such a sequence of (color,count) pairs, as shown here:

byte 0 color for run 1
1 count for run 1
2 color for run 2
3 count for run 2
...
2n-2 color for run n
2n-1 count for run n

Each color is a value between 0 and 255 specifying the color index (of the pallet) for that pixel run. Each count is a value between 0 and 255 specifying the length in pixels of that pixel run.

I believe the lower left is row 1, working up to the top.

[Gary Seven]

Wow. Where do I even start? Almost NO icons today (talking 2022 versus 1998) use the gif format, unless they're the bs animated gifs. Then, let's look at your post wrt using "iconlib.exe." The only way I could test this executable was to set up a virtual machine, load MS-Dos 6.22 and then proceed to waste a couple of hours trying to generate a compatible file which in the end just failed. So it seems one MUST use a gif, but nowadays all I can find on the net are either ico or other formats, such that of course this prehistoric "inconlib.exe" file will fail.

Bottom line, this is a waste of time but the response to my OP was even worse. Honestly, who the hell has time to mess around like this? So I'll just let the sleeping dog lie where it is and go no further. The thing I wanted to do is NOT only hard to do, it's nearly impossible given that we are all on 64-bit systems where the silly "inconlib.exe" will not even work, and even inside a DOS VM it's just about impossible to create the weird file format required to use with the BootIt software.

So thanks but no thanks, I give up. The little icon I wanted just to dress up my "Boot" menu just isn't worth the extra effort.

[TeraByte Support]

You can use DOS or Win x86 to run it. GIF is supported by just about all graphic packages including paint. The key would be to ensure you have the correct pallet because it needs to be a 256 color GIF.