Anime Hard Drive: Part I

Desktop Example

by Hsin Tsao

It's Monday morning and you're back at work after your 60-hour Maison Ikkoku marathon. You flip on the computer monitor and the oh-so-pretty green screen comes to life. . . bleech. Then it hits you. . . ANIME WITHDRAWL! But this doesn't have to be. In Part 1 of this series, I'll help you conquer that withdrawal by talking about how to bring anime to your computer through basic wallpaper and icons. In the future, I'll talk about themes, screen savers, and other interesting and unusual anime-related utilities found scattered around the Net. So, even at work you won't be far away from Shampoo, Tenchi, or any of your other favorite anime characters.

Wallpaper:
One of the easiest and quickest way to bring anime to your computer is through the use of wallpaper (not the hardware store variety). First, you have to select a nice looking image. I recommend looking at the various anime archives around the web.

One of my favorite places to search for anime images is Venice Anime-Manga Archive. Here, you will find a huge selection of anime/manga images along with sound files, movie files, games, and utilities. If you find the site to be too busy, you might try one of its mirrors using FTP at ftp.sunet.se (/pub/tv+movies/anime-manga). Another good general image archive is Kiki's Image Service. This is a very nicely organized site arranged by series and offers small indexed images for previews. (Note: Sometimes, you'll come across a thumbnail (or smaller version of an) image, and find that the link is broken. This is because the image is mirrored at a different site.)

Beside general image sites, there are many places on the web dedicated to specific series. A good list of these kind of sites (or anything else related to anime) can be found at The Anime Web Turnpike.

After getting the image you like, you might need to do a little image manipulation. Microsoft Windows users will probably need to convert the image into .bmp format so that Windows can load it. I've used a nice little DOS utility called GIF2BMP.EXE to convert gif files into bmp files. This program is pretty old, and probably can't do gif89 files, but I think that it is freeware. The shareware program Paint Shop Pro 4.12 (for Win95/NT) by JASC, Inc. is a good image editing program that will also do conversions between a good number of formats (a Win3.x version is also available).

Sometimes, a image won't fit your desktop just right. Again, you can use an image editing program like Paint Shop to resize the image. If you have Plus! for Win95, there is a built-in utility that will stretch the image to fit the screen. Note that once you resize an image from its original size, it won't look as nice. There are a few work-arounds that you might try. A small image can be "tiled" so that the same image is copied side-by-side until the screen is filled up. Or, you can simply modify the edge of the image to make it blend in with the desktop. I recommend using Adobe Photoshop for manipulating the images in both methods. Check out Andy's Photoshop Tips on how to make seamless background images suitable for tiling. As for modifying the edge:

This is a very rough sketch of the procedure. I will try to put up clearer step-by-step instructions in the future if time/school permits.

Icons:
Icons are another aspect of a computer desktop that can be customized. A good collection of anime icons can found at Frank Ho's WWW page. A windows specific set by Scott Rux can be downloaded here.

Next Issue:
This month's article is very basic. It mainly points out some resources. In the next issue, I'll look at some anime-related software for the desktop including Software Sculpture's Ranma 1/2 screen saver. In other future issues, I'll also be looking at various software that can be found around the web, but which might not be simply desktop enhancements.

 Create your own free wiki!Support CommunityPublic, Premium Early Adopter wiki Privacy Policy RSS