Custom Bios Logos

12 Step Custom Logo Creation Walk Through

When York1 asked me to do a little write up on the making of a custom logo I didn't realize how much work would be involved documenting each step and it's turned out to be a real learning experience for me since I've never written much before . The whole process was done from within Win2k and while there's a lot of redundancy all of the steps are necessary if your starting from scratch .

First the usual disclaimer . USE AT YOUR OWN RISK ! Flashing your bios can cause problems if you don't know what your doing and remember that after flashing you have to reset all your bios settings . Also check out our page on Bios flashing.I also highly recommend product called Bios Savior which gives you a dual bios so you can swap to a working bios if by chance you have a problem . In all times that I've flashed my bios when checking out logos etc I've only had a bad flash twice and both of those were with a beta bios and all I had to do was flip a switch and boot off the Bios Savior then flip the switch back and re-flash . It's one great product !

There are a few inherent limitations to the creation process , you can only use 16 colors ( 4bit ) and you can use only one color in each of the 153 squares of the grid , the bmp has to be 136 by 126 and with the VP6 bios can only use EPA Version one . If you use Version two you'll end up with colored splotches all over the screen instead of a nice logo .

Tools used in the process - Paint Shop Pro , Photo Shop , Paint , Bios Logo , EPACoder and the utility for incorporating the logo into the bios cbrom . You can use Paint alone if you don't have Paint Shop or Photo Shop , you'll just be a little limited in what you can do . ( Bios Logo is shareware so your limited to opening bmp files and saving to epa version 2 as well as some other limitations but it's necessary in a couple of the steps ) .

Step 1 - I created a 136 pixel by 126 pixel bmp in Paint Shop Pro then saved the bmp as buckshot.bmp in a working directory ( in this case I'm using New Logo ) .

Click on Thumbnails for larger images

Step 2 - I then opened the bmp in Photo Shop and added text , used the warp text tool and moved the text into the desired position then saved the bmp .

Step 3 - I opened the bmp in paint , changed the color of the text to black , edited the letters k & S so that they didn't touch and saved the bmp .

Step 4 - Then I opened the bmp in Bio Logo , converted it to a epa file and saved it to Buckshot.epa .

Step 5 - I opened the buckshot.epa in EPACoder , converted it to bmp and saved it as buckshot.bmp .

Step 6 - I then opened the bmp in Paint , removed the green shareware marker from the right corner then changed the color of the text ( Buckshot ) to the desired colors and changed the background color to black and once again save the bmp .

Onto Page 2!