How-To: Start Menu Folder Icons

[fr4nk1yn]

Been searching for an "answer" to this for awhile and haven't found anything ):

Basically I'd like to add icon files to the folders I created in the start menu.
Like the Games and Office mobile has.
I had a Moto Q9c that had more folders with icons.

When opened in a text editor the "icon" is simply 1#shellres.dll,-8229
When that dll is extracted with ResHack the icon isn't used by games isn't there. I was hoping that there would be a selection of resources that could be used.

Is there another way to create these files?

[fr4nk1yn]

OK..
I found a website that had some info then did some playing.

Here's: the website I found. It's a good starting point, but..
The "shortcuts" given in step3 are incorrect, at least for my dll. And even so the choices would be limited.
The tutorial link in step7 doesn't work. The link to XDA does, which contributed.

Here's my take on it:

First things first. Ico files needed to be found.
I used some Vista Folder icons sourced from DeviantArt.com.
There's plenty of places such as IconArchive.com to find them. Google is our friend.

Next ResHack isn't the best these days, it's no longer being updated and there's other choices now, it often gives "out of resources" errors when editing the dll.
A quick search, and some good luck, found IcoFX which will do everything needed.

I opened shelres.192.dll for a reference, it has the most icon resources I found.
The largest icon was 64x64-8bit. So that was the goal.

In IcoFX I opened the ico I downloaded and it had a lot more sizes.



side note: I first used ResHack and simply added the icos to the dll.
While it worked it appeared to try and use a 32bit graphic with shadow and it came out "ugly".
That's when I found IcoFX and made the next changes.
I stripped out the unwanted sizes simply by deleting them.



When all but 16x16-8, 32x32-8, 48x48-8 and 64x64-32 I converted the 64x64-32 to 64x64-8..



..and saved the ico with another file name.

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Easy enough so far.
On the menu I went to "Tools" > "Resource Editor" and chose the dll.
Oh yeah. I was not able to copy the dll from the phone directly, fortunately I disassemble a ROM and had the file available.
Right click > "Add" then I chose the ico I just modified then saved.
The icon is given a number when interested, that had to be remembered for later.
BTW, The program automatically backs up the dll.



I then copied the dll to the phones \Windows folder.
Note: I saved it as newshellres.dll and deleted all the other icons from it.
Saving it as is and replacing the original file in the \Windows folder wouldn't hurt anything as long as it was done correct.

I took an existing icon file from the phone and copied it to the desktop.
note: If the "hidden files and folders" option is checked in folder options that file will "disappear" when copied.
Opened in a text editor the file contains "1#shellres.dll,-xxxxx".
The xxxxx was replaced with the number of the inserted icon.
As an alternative the XDA thread gives the proper instructions for creating the file from scratch:
Create a text file with "1#shellres.dll,-xxxxx" then save it as "icon.lnk" INCLUDING the quotation marks, then set the properties as "hidden".

Create the folder in the start menu and copy the icon file to it and it should show the chosen icon.

Screen02.jpg

That's it. Hope it helps somebody else looking to customize their start menu.
Attached it a plain shellres.dll file to be modified.