17

In the old Windows 3.1 days I had an icon of an expressive and very good pixel-art reproduction of DaVinci's Mona Lisa portrait. I'd like to have this icon again, but I couldn't find it anywhere. Which .DLL file was it located in? The icon looked like this:

http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/MonaIcon.gif

I checked into moricons.dll and some other files from the Windows 3.11 distribution, but still couldn't find it.

Improve this question
3
  • 3
    WOW, I remember this...
    – Shinrai
    Commented Sep 29, 2011 at 22:54
  • 8
    Why not convert that .gif version to an .ico?
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Commented Sep 29, 2011 at 23:11
  • Please tell us why if you want more mod points :)
    – Paul
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 0:01

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
22

It looks like the icon is in progman.exe, the Program Manager executable file. In Windows XP, you can still find the icon in %SystemRoot%\system32\progman.exe...

Program Manager icons

After rediscovering this, I think I remember that when you manually created a shortcut in Program Manager, the icons embedded in progman.exe were provided as default choices, or you could click a Browse button to open another .ico or .dll file like moricons.dll. But it's been so long ago, I don't have a copy to play with to confirm, and haven't been able to find information about it online.

Improve this answer
4
  • 2
    +1 and I remember this being the default set of icons too.
    – Randolf Richardson
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 0:43
  • 2
    I notice the Windows XP version is slightly different (dark yellow for the frame, instead of the original bright yellow; dark green grass instead of bright green). I think I remember these changes were introduced in Windows 95. If you ever used the Mona Lisa icon in Windows 3.1, you may remember the icon looked too bright compared to other icons.
    – Bavi_H
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 1:33
  • Thank you very much! I was examining files with "additional" icons, and completely forgot what in Windows 3.x Program Manager had extensive set of addtitional icons too! And you are completely right on default icon choices - moricons.dll has "more icons" in addtion to icons in progman.exe
    – user539484
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 1:40
  • 1
    Yes, exactly, 3.11 have brighter icon than XP,
    – user539484
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 1:59
11

Although I don't remember which .DLL this image is from, in the hopes of solving your problem I've taken your image and converted it with Adobe Photoshop (and one other proprietary command-line tool called "PNG2ICO") to a .ico file for you. You can download it from here:

  enter image description here
  Mona Lisa icon file (2,238 bytes)
  http://www.lumbercartel.ca/images/interesting/monalisa.ico

Thanks for that nice trip down memory lane!

Improve this answer
3
  • 1
    paint.net would do direct saving to .ico with a plugin
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 0:34
  • 1
    Thank you for your efforts! Good scaling 144x144 -> 32x32
    – user539484
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 2:01
  • 1
    BTW, there is a plugin for Photoshop to read and write windows icon format, also GIMP2 supports it natively
    – user539484
    Commented Sep 30, 2011 at 2:03

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .