Exploring Resources Tutorial

Tutorial: Exploring the resources of Explorer

The first example demonstrates how you open a file in Restorator and how to explore the resources.

You can now choose the file that contains resources you would like to work with. For this tutorial, select C:\Windows\Explorer.exe. This is your Windows file explorer.

When you hit OK, all resources of the explorer will be  displayed in in the Resource Tree.   You can see that Explorer has Resources of types Bitmap, Menu, Dialog, String, Accelerators, Icon and Version. You can now explorer all the 'ingredients' of this application.

Now to see the list of images, click on "Bitmap".

The Resource Viewer displays the list of images. Every entry on the right side correspands to an image that is can be displayed by the application.  They are identified by numbers, 143, 149, etc. You can see the size and a description  of each bitmap.

To see the images, click on the "+" next to "Bitmap" and select an image:

There are some strange images, maybe you recognize some of them ?

With the same method, you can look at the other resources of Explorer. You will see the different methods to display the resources. Here are some examples:

Menus (as text)

Dialogs (as real dialogs)

Strings (as text)

Accelerators

There are different ways to look at resources choose the Viewer menu item to explore them. You can also display any resource as hex dump by clicking the Hexdump toool button .

Icons (as icon with choice which format and which background color for display)

Version information

You now have an idea of what resources are and how they are displayed in Restorator. Follow the next tutorials to learn how to find and modify them.

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