PortableApps (R34 Mod)
Menu Modification Tutorial

Please note (again) that the Mod menus are not officially supported on PortableApps.com or in the PortableApps.com forums. Even so, there are plenty of knowledgeable fans who are willing to help with questions.

For this installment, we will look down and check out the drive information on the bottom of the R34 Mod Menu and clean up some of the things in the theme.ini that didn't fit nicely anywhere else.

We have already seen in Part 1 of this tutorial that the autorun.inf file holds the key to naming your drive. In the theme.ini there is a section heading called [lblDriveName] and it looks very much like any of the normal "sbtn" sections we have become familiar with.

Like those other sections, you can move the Drive Name around, make it visible or not, change the font, colors, etc. The "sbtn" item of Margin doesn't exist since we aren't trying to stay away from an icon. Another difference is that there isn't any mouse-over highlight to modify with the height and width, but those settings do affect the area allowed for DriveName. If you shrink the width enough, you will start to chop off the drive letter portion of the DriveName.

Of course, the exact width at which this happens will vary with the length of your own DriveName. Also, if you want to increase the DriveName's left setting to move it away from the edge (say from 8 to maybe 18) you'll probably want to reduce the Width by a corresponding amount to avoid running into the DriveSpace area.

There are really three parts to the DriveSpace Indicator on the R34 Mod Menu.

First, there's an area in the overall menu graphic (background.jpg) that is distinguished from the ordinary appearance and is intended for DriveSpace.

Then there is the graphic of the slider that is usually a contrasting color for greater visibility. As the drive fills up, the small slider graphic is repeated (stretched?) more times, giving the visual appearance of increasing. The placement of this graphic is controlled in the [imgDriveSpace] section of the theme.ini file.

Finally, there is [lblDriveSpace] section of the theme.ini file. This is the text that says "xxx free of xxx", giving you the amount used and the total capacity of the drive.

The [lblDriveSpace] and [imgDriveSpace] have settings just like you've seen previously in this tutorial. Should be no mystery there.

For people using USB Flash Memory sticks or other devices with limited size, the DriveSpace Indicator is quite important. As you can see from the clip of my menu (above), I have "107.6GB free of 112GB". I'm using a portable hard drive with lots of available space, so I just don't see the need to keep a close eye on DriveSpace!

Something that I've done is set both the [lblDriveSpace] and [imgDriveSpace] to Visible=0. That will take care of that useless piece of information, right? Only now I have a "hole" in my theme again - that flat spot where the DriveSpace info was supposed to go. I've filled that with the DriveName. Just adjust the Left setting on DriveName and slide it over until it sits in the right place!

The scroll up and down buttons only appear on the menu when there's something above or below the portion of the application list you can see in the menu's main window. If your list is short, you won't see the buttons controlled by the [sbtnScrollUp] or the [sbtnScrollDown]. They have height, width, left and top settings just like other sections, but they don't have a Visible item. The menu handles turning the buttons on or off as needed.

We've spent a lot of time looking at the R34 Mod Menu, how it appears, and how to change it. One of the last parts of the theme.ini we haven't discussed is the actual picture of the menu, background.jpg. The section heading called [imgBackground] puts the graphic on the screen. Set Visible in this section to zero, and here's what you'll get. (Remember that the application names and category names are set to black, so against the black background you won't see them.)

But can we change the black background? Section heading [frmMenu] puts this box on the screen. It holds ColorR, ColorG, and ColorB settings, all defaulted to zero, which makes the color black. Maybe we want it to be blue? Set ColorB=255, and here's the result.

That's it for this section of the tutorial.

In the next section we'll take a look at custom buttons.