Nrrrds R Us A Little Excursion into the Brain of Your Mac Yeah, this is the mac-specific page. Settle down, you users (and used) of Win95 I can already hear the blood bubbling in thick curdles around your brainstems to even think about tolerating anything to do with the Mac, but it's my page, dag nab it. I've already got four of Lisa's children, and will likely buy a couple more soon (one of them also runs Win95. And Unix. And BeOS). One link in Stupid Palace Tricks seems like a tiny bit of discomfort for you to bear as you slowly realize that maybe there might be more to the Mac than a smiley-faced login and built-in speech. So take a beta blocker, and let's proceed.

If you don't already know what ResEdit is, well then it's either time to learn or time to skip on to the linx page.
The Palace client, like any mac program, has a resource fork. When Apple introduced ResEdit, they intended for users to go right ahead and hack into any program as they saw fit. This doesn't always please every software developer, particularly one up in Redmond that's infamous for using code that overrides resources. But there it is.

Here's a useful trick sent by John V. Goodman: I got tired of scrolling up and down the teeny prop palette, as I run a 17" monitor in 1152x870 mode. So I went into ResEdit and changed the "Prop Palette" WIND to H812xW371. It now shows 7x18 = 136 props. I also changed the "User List" and "Room List" WINDs to H398xW248. With these stacked on the left, the mainwindow top center, the log under it, and the prop palette to the right, everything fills an 1152x870 monitor quite nicely.

Oversized Prop and Find-Room Windows on a 13" Monitor

This wise alteration of WIND resources is a good example of productive tweaking with ResEdit. Another might be changing the #130 PICT resource to Black and White for use on a Powerbook or old SE (#130 is the Palace "Splash Page" picture).
In the spirit of Props n Bots, there are also plenty of pointless and stupid ways to tweak the client resources. Best of all, you can do them rather idly and just for fun. Here are some to try:

• Swap-in other snd resources to replace the built-in ones: "DoorClose," "DoorOpen," "Fader," and "Chime." I'm a bit partial to a sly snicker as a replacement for "DoorOpen."
• Alter the "M&M" clut resource and have a wee psychedelic time.
• Put Cmd-U back on the "Wizard" menu item (though this is better done with QuicKeys).
• Change the palette and other button cicn icon images. My favorite victims are the KILL and NAKED buttons.