SPT A Tale of Three Bars

Today's trick: taking control of the Palace room GIFs.

3 Bars Almost everyone knows that the room pictures are GIF picture files, stored in the "Pictures" and "Media" directories within your Palace directory. As you visit different places, new GIFs may be added to named subdirectories of "Pictures."
What most people don't know is that you can replace these pictures with your own GIFs as long as they are the right size (512x384) and use the Palace color palette, Palace will never know the difference. So you could replace the Beach with a shot of Lake Erie, or the Pit with a picture of your high school. As long as the pic is valid, Palace will happily use it.
The picture at the right shows three versions of Harry's Bar. The very top is just the plain old "BAR.GIF" image. The center is almost the same: a light grid has been painted over it, and the coördinates of a few key spots (such as the chairs) have been marked. The bottom is a black-and-white dithered bitmap version of the bar.
Why the alternative versions of the bar? The grid was originally added yo make it easier to "spoof" someone (i.e., use "msay") in Harry's. You can't use "msay" in a Cyborg-Free zone like Harry's, so having a few key spots pre-marked, and the whole room gridded, made it easy to quickly guess what "@" values to type-in by hand to get good spoofing going in the bar.
The B&W version was made (along with B&W versions of all the rooms) so that I could run Palace on my old Mac Powerbook 140 a machine with Color Quickdraw in software, but only a B&W display. This is an especially-stupid trick, because user props still come in in full color (meaning they usually appear as nothing but a black blob on the powerbook screen). Still, it works! And I have used it once or twice when no other machine was handy (now if Palace Inc. would just get with it and finish porting Palace to the Amiga...). I even went so far as to B&W-ify the splash page PICT resource in the Palace binary itself, using ResEdit.
Other useful GIF hacks might include labelling doors, so you know where they lead; insane tweaking of the color maps, for a psychedelic palace; heavy blurring and resampling of the GIFs to make the files smaller and faster-loading; recoloring all the rooms to complement your own hair and eyes, Barbara Streisand style.