From Guides

by poetic_folly

The outer screen on the Maxx has its own unique .ski and .dat file. Other 240x320 skins (V3x, V3xx) will work on the Maxx, but will give errors on the outer screen, such as not showing the date/time, etc, or having images too small. The screen size is 120x160.

This reference page assumes you are already familiar with editing skins, etc. I may write up a full guide later, who knows.

Useful programs while editing these external skins

• dat2gif
• Photoshop or some other image editing software

The Information=

All right, on to the info. There are 37 .gif files contained in the .dat file which makes up the Maxx external skin. Here are their definitions:

• 001.gif - 120x24 - Header Background in menus
• 002.gif - 5x5 - top corner of scroll bar background when in music
• 003.gif - 5x1 - scroll bar background when in music
• 004.gif - 5x5 - bottom of scroll bar background when in music
• 005.gif - 5x5 - top corner of scroll bar background when song is playing and in ring styles. best to leave transparent
• 006.gif - 5x1 - scroll bar background when song is playing and in ring styles. best to leave transparent
• 007.gif - 5x5 - bottom of scroll bar background when song is playing and in ring styles. best to leave transparent
• 008.gif - 5x5 - top corner of scroll bar when in music
• 009.gif - 5x1 - scroll bar when in music
• 010.gif - 5x5 - bottom of scroll bar when in music
• 011.gif - 118x26 - header background on lock/unlock message
• 012.gif - 118x4 - message bacground on lock/unlock message
• 013.gif - 118x2 - message bottom on lock/unlock message
• 014.gif - 113x24 - selected background in music menu
• 015.gif - 116x74 - not sure
• 016.gif - 114x49 - not sure
• 017.gif - 12x12 - right arrow unpressed
• 018.gif - 12x12 - left arrow unpressed
• 019.gif - 12x12 - minus sign (down?) unpressed
• 020.gif - 12x12 - plus sign (up?) unpressed
• 021.gif - 12x12 - right arrow pressed
• 022.gif - 12x12 - left arrow pressed
• 023.gif - 12x12 - minus sign pressed
• 024.gif - 12x12 - plus sign pressed
• 025.gif - 12x12 - menu button unpressed
• 026.gif - 12x12 - menu button pressed
• 027.gif - 124x21 - not sure, looks like 11
• 028.gif - 124x62 - not sure, looks like full window version of 012
• 029.gif - 124x9 - not sure, looks like top of 016
• 030.gif - 111x18 - not sure, looks like 14 but a little shorter
• 031.gif - 124x8 - not sure, similar to 029
• 032.gif - 80x80 - looks like a volume background, although i can't find where its used
• 033.gif - 94x18 - not sure, looks unused
• 034.gif - 94x18 - not sure, looks unused
• 035.gif - 120x24 - not sure, looks like 001 but lighter
• 036.gif - 120x24 - options background when playing a song
• 037.gif - 120x24 - looks same as 036

Thats the .dat info basically.

The .dat files will change the 'gif's, but in order to change things like the font colors, etc, you will need to edit the .ski file. You will also have to do some editing of the .ski file in order for the new .dat files to work. At the moment, skinner4moto doesn't support editing external skins, so we're working in our favorite text editors here.

Some relevant info for the Maxx cli.ski file:

8 Header font
9 Header font outline
10 Header font outline 2
51 Status window font
52 Status window font outline
53 Status window font outline 2
73 Time and date font
74 Time and date font outline
75 Time and date font outline 2
86 Music Info font color
96 Highlighted menu font
97 Highlighted menu font outline
98 Highlighted menu font outline 2

From Rasputin, here's a little relevant info on .ski files in general:

How to edit "external" skins

The external display of the V3x is controlled by the Skinname_cli.ski file and the Skinname_cli.dat file. They are indeed like little skins where all the graphics (16 of them) are in the dat file and the position, font colour and outine and so on are set in the ski file, just as in the "real" skins. Unfortunately they can not edited by S4M, but you can change the gif files in the dat file by using dat2gif to extract the gif files. Then you edit them, when done go to MS Command Prompt, navigate into the folder where the gifs are and type "copy/b *.gif Skinname_cli.dat" That will produce a new cli.dat file with the changed gif files. Now open that one again with dat2gif and close dat2gif. You should have a ski.map file now. Open that ski.map file in Wordpad and you will see 16 lines with 3 numbers in each line like this

0 652 0 
652 450 0 
1102 89 0 

The middle number is the file size of the gif, the first number is the added sum and the last number is the location (here dat0 file). You will need that ski.map file. Now open the ski file in Wordpad and start replacing all 3 numbers in a line starting with 5 with the 3 numbers from the ski.map file. There are 16 lines starting with 5 in the ski file and you have 16 lines in the ski.map file. Any line in the ski file starting with 4 is a font colour. There are usually 3 of them in a row. Font colour, Font Outline1, Font Outline2. When you have changed all you have to do save the ski file and put them into the skin folder on your phone. Now you have a matching external display skin to the internal display skin. Lines starting with 3 are Boolean, like on/off switch. True=on and False=off. Lines starting with 2 are Numeric Values, 0= No font outlines, 1= only font outline 1, 2= fontoutline 1 and 2. Other values, please leave alone cos I am not fully sure what they mean. Lines starting with 1 are positions of graphics or colour space. There are 4 numbers, the first two are the coordinates of the top left corner and the last two are the coordinates of the bottom right corner.

If there is no external skin (cli.dat and cli.ski) with a skin then the "default" external skin from Moto will be applied.

OK here is an example don't look for it I just made this up. The original skinname_cli.ski file has the following lines

5 0 652 0 
5 652 450 0 
5 1102 89 0 

The 5 at the start of each line stands for Graphic, so whenever you see a 5 at the beginning of a line you know that is some code for a graphic/image of a gif file. There are 16 lines starting with a 5 cos there are 16 gif files compressed in the skinname_cli.dat file. If you would extract the gifs from the cli.dat file the first gif file, GIF001.gif, would have a size of 652 KB and the second gif file, GIF002.gif, would be 450 KB and so on. Now you have changed the gifs to go with the skin and in the ski.map file the first lines are:

0 550 0 
550 385 0 
935 237 0 

Now you have to replace the 3 numbers that follow the 5 with the 3 numbers from the ski.map file. the original cli.ski line 5 0 652 0 becomes now 5 0 550 0 and the second line 5 652 450 0 becomes 5 550 385 0 and the third line 5 1102 89 0 becomes 5 935 237 0 and so on until all 16 lines have been replaced. This is essential for the external skin to work cos you have created 16 new gif files that have a different KB-size then the original ones. Now you have to put those new sizes into the cli.ski file. Your V3x will read the ski file, look for a line starting with 5, then reads the values that follow (combined KB-sum, individual KB-size, dat file number) and for the first line it knows now that it is the first gif (combined KB-sum=0) the gif file has a KB-size of 550 KB and it can find it in the dat file number 0 (all skins, external and internal do NOT have a skinname0.dat it is always skinname.dat, hence skinname_cli.dat). I hope this makes it a bit more understandable what you have to do and why.

Good luck!