Wallpaper manager for XaAES

This is more or less a proof of concept. It does work, but the usability is limited without proper support from XaAES.
NEW:The wallpaper can now be saved as an IMG file for use with Thing!

Download: wallp1_3.zip

Install and run

This program use zView's image codecs to load and convert images. This means that it will load any image format supported by zView, and it also means that you have to have zView (the original or Mikro's improved one with LDG modules) installed.
The wallpaper manager will look for codecs in the following folders:

The folder pointed to by the environment variable "LDGPATH".
c:\gemsys\ldg\
In the folder "codecs" in the same directory as walpaper.prg. A few codecs is included in this archive.

Now unpack the archive and run walpaper.prg to create/set a wallpaper. If you want it to automatically create the wallpaper when you switch to another resolution you will need to run it from xaaes.cnf as well:

run u:\c\mint\walpaper.prg --create_wallpaper

It will now run whenever XaAES starts. It will check if there is an existing wallpaper for the current resolution. If it is, it will just exit. If there isn't, it will create the wallpaper you specified with "Set" and then quietly exit.

Usage

Load the image you want to use as a wallpaper, either by dropping it on walpaper.prg, dragging it to the Wallpaper manager window or using the "Load" button and fileselector.

Choose how the image should be displayed:

Stretch - the image will be resized to the size of the entire screen, disregarding the aspect ratio of the original image.
Zoom - like with stretch the image will be resized to the size of the screen, but now with aspect ratio preserved.
Tile - the image will be tiled to fill the entire screen.

There's two ways to tell XaAES to display this wallpaper:

Press ESC to display the wallpaper in fullscreen. Press Control+Alt+: to tell XaAES to create a wallpaper of the currently displayed screen. Exit fullscreen mode by pressing ESC again.
First select which resolution(s) the wallpaper should be applied to, the current one or all resolutions. Then select "Set". The wallpaper will now be written to the disk in the location XaAES expects. However, it is not being displayed yet, because there is not (yet) a way to instruct XaAES to load a new wallpaper. Press Control+Alt+Shift+N to load the newly created xa_form.mfd.
Now, if you have configured XaAES to run the wallpaper manager when booting (see "Install and run" section) it will create the wallpaper from the specified image when you boot into a resolution that not yet have a wallpaper. Again, since there is no way to instruct XaAES to actually load and display this wallpaper you need to either wait for the next XaAES boot or do it manually.

You can also clear the wallpaper from both the XaAES folder and the Wallpaper settings using the "Clear" function. Again, this does not take effect until the next XaES boot since there is not yet any way to tell XaAES to unload the current wallpaper.

Both the "Set" and "Clear" function behaves differently depending on the "Resolution" setting. If "Current" is selected only the wallpaper for the current resolution is set or cleared. If "All" is selected the wallpapers for all resolutions is cleared when using "Clear". When using "Set", the wallpaper for the current resolution is set, and cleared for all other resolutions.

This sounds a bit odd, but it makes sense when running the wallpaper manager from xaaes.cnf with the "-create_wallpaper" parameter (see above).

The wallpaper can also be exported as an unpacked IMG file for usage with e.g. Thing! Right-click on the wallpaper preview and select "Save IMG". As Thing!'s default wallpaper module only handles up to 256 colours, the exported image will be reduced to 8-bit using the NVDI palette if you're in a videomode with more than 256 colours. NB! Colour reduction requires NVDI 5 to be present.

If you use this program to generate IMG's for Thing! you can disregard the set/clear functionality above.

History

Sep. 2025 - initial release.
April 22nd 2026 - bugfix: Didn't work when either horisontal or vertical resolution was less than 1000 pixels.
April 23rd 2026:
- Bugfix/workaround - zView codecs always produced an odd number of lines when resizing if the original bitmap had an odd number of lines. This caused the resulting wallpaper to be one line too small and XaAES would not load it.
- Fixed a bug related to BubbleGEM tooltips. I recommend you install BGEM.NG.
- Now respects the stretch/zoom/tile setting when creating a wallpaper when booting/changing resolution.
- Faster when the source image is of the same size as the desktop.
June 8th 2026:
- Added IMG export feature.

June 2026, joska@online.no