Tutorial: Changing Hammer Last edited 1 year ago2023-01-19 22:53:40 UTC

No, I'm not confusing ZHLT and Hammer. I'm showing you how to customise Hammer's appearance a little. I take no responsibility for anything on the face of the earth ever blah blah blah blah.

Okay, here're a few replacement splash screens I cobbled together for the purposes of this demonstration. I will show you how to take this image and put it into HAMMER.EXE, so I recommend backing up the original program file before beginning. Now you need to get a little program called Resource Hacker. You can get that from this page, and it's about a 3mb download.

Once you have Resource Hacker, run the application to check it's working. Leave it open while you follow the next step.

Now, I want you to take the replacement splash screen and save it somewhere as a Bitmap (extension '.BMP'). You can do this in MS Paint or any other basic image editor.

Once you've done this, go back to Resource Hacker. Click File -> Open and then browse to Hammer.exe. Some jargon and odd numbers will appear in the left hand pane. Click the + next to Bitmap and a submenu will unfurl. Then find 172 in this new menu and click the plus sign next to that.

Now click on the 1033 under 172. It's the only option. Look! The original splash! Right-click 1033. A menu will show; click Replace Resource. A dialog box will now appear. Select your new splash by clicking the appropriately-titled button at the top-left. When you've selected the splash, click Replace. Then just click File -> Save.

Open Hammer and bask in its beauty.

Look at all the other places in Hammer. You can replace the bitmaps for the toolbar buttons, you can even change menu texts. Don't be afraid to experiment. Remember that even if worst comes to worst, you can just re-download Hammer and it'll be fine.

You could try it with other programs too - just remember to back it up!