Royale Noir: A Secret XP Theme Uncovered
Sometime after the launch of XP, somewhere in Redmond, someone on the Microsoft design team was in the progress of developing something for Media Center. It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. Now 3 years later, a young man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard of theme, and travelled far and wide to uncover its mysteries.
Devoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on one of the “people_ready” television commercials airing in the United States. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered this mystery XP theme by Microsoft. W3bbo writes:
“During Royale’s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass” effect. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noir”, it even works with Office 2003.
Since the skin was never released (or reached final adjustments) there are a few issues with it: some of the colors don’t meet the overall “feel” (they’re too purple-ish compared to the greys of the bitmaps) and the inactive titlebars are a little too dark.
You’ll find it’s been signed by Microsoft and doesn’t require a custom UxTheme.dll in case there are any doubts as to its authenticity.
If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name.
This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now.”
Screenshots
Review
Without a doubt, XP Media Center’s Royale theme was a huge improvement over Luna (the default theme). It updated the cliché bevelled look-and-feel if XP to a contemporary glossy style, while keeping similar color schemes and layouts. In my opinion, it was the most usable non-standard XP theme available. I absolutely love it.
Royale Noir is an almost exact copy of Royale except with a dark purplish tint. If Royale was day, Royale Noir is night. No doubt about it, this is a ‘dark’ theme. If you’re the sort of person who likes bright and vivid colors, you can use the standard Royale theme included in the archive below.
As W3bbo pointed out, there are a few issues with this theme due to its incompleteness. The most obvious being, the “Start” buttons hover and active states are unchanged from Royale, inconsistent with the purple tint surrounding. However, there is even a color scheme for Office 2003 so it will not default to the blue Luna colors.
Looking at it from the big picture, Royale Noir is a welcomed alternative to the extremely small collection of verified-by-Microsoft XP themes. However being incomplete, it is not recommended for the general consumers (although, you wont have any problems). Enthusiasts are welcomed to try it to stand out from the crowd, but even still, you’ll feel right at home with the familiar Luna/Royale style.
Download Royale Noir
Extract files to “c:\windows\resources\themes\”, this will create folder named “Royale”. Double click “luna.msstyles” within the “Royale” folder. Select “Noir” from color scheme. This theme includes the standard Royale theme that was released with Windows Media Center.
I take no credit for this amazing find. W3bbo did an amazing job uncovering this mystery XP theme, hats off to him!
EDIT 12/10/06: Microsoft has released a Zune theme that is pretty similar, you can download it from them here.
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If you have Windows XP, why do you use linux? Basically I dont see any advantages to using linux over windows xp, Im dual booting windows and ubuntu. Ubuntu is nice and all but I dont see anything that would make me prefer it over windows.The only thing i have been using ubuntu for is web browsing playing music/movies (cant play games) which I can do better/hassle free in windows. So what are the advantages of l using linux over xp?
it’s called development
I don’t why this comment is posted on this page but to answer your question, I was running a dual boot setup because a lot of my friends run one or another flavor of Linux and swear by it.
I tried dual-booting for a while but realized that I was spending more time getting Linux to work then actually getting any work done.
I’m currently running XP only on all of my machines. I’m sure I’ll install Linux again . . .
[…] […]
[…] If you noticed that my Start bar is black and want to know how to do that, click here. […]
Love this!
My home and office desktops look very sleek!
wow omg… dude this post just made your blog the best blog ever
thank God for Technorati and link trains!!! I’m glad I found your blog and this post… lol…
sorry… but royale and royale noir are both amazing themes… I know royale is the default for media center but I have win xp home and I really liked the media center look
great post!!! thanks, and special thanks to W3bbo
with regards to linux, I’ve only tried Ubuntu and the only advantage I can see is it has most of what you need right out of the box, and it’s free. But if you already have an operating system running that you’re comfortable with, I don’t see switching to Linux as a good option, specially if you’re an average computer user, you’d have to figure out how to install drivers and such.
Glad you like the site! Stick around, there is a ton of great stuff coming up!
Pretty cool, now you have me reading posts from the wayback machine (this one from 2006). I’m hooked.
lol that happened to me too
I think his blog just has that effect on people…
That’s so cool of you guys to say!! Thanks!
I downloaded and installed it…very cool looking. I don’t where you find all this stuff. Now on to the start button change.
This is a cool theme, i will try this:)
Just wanted to point out that that explore.exe will not launch on startup if you change the color theme to Royale before messing with the start bar text.
This is good stuff tho
wat? go away!
it works gr8 thanks
any idea how to change the start bar orange?
The Zune theme has an orange start bar.
i am not satisfied………..
but my friend is says this is cool
[…] Once again I was stumbling through the Net, just to discover an article at samanathon.com about “Royale Nour: A Secret XP Theme Uncovered“. […]
Very nice. Thanks!
thanks, my computer looks pretty bad ass now.
Hot! :>
wow lol mi comp looks soooooooooooooooo bad ass now rofl im like totally wtf LOLOLOL IT IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO COOOOOOOOOOOL ROFL LOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!
I think Umbo is happy.
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking!
It’s funny, this was one of my first posts on this blog and it’s still one of the most popular!
yeah it’s my favorite post of yours too
how u get this to work down loded it and unziped it than what
Here, I’ll quote my directions:
Extract files to “c:\windows\resources\themes\”, this will create folder named “Royale”. Double click “luna.msstyles” within the “Royale” folder. Select “Noir” from color scheme. This theme includes the standard Royale theme that was released with Windows Media Center.
SWEET! Just foudn this from a link of a link of a link…. darkness has come to my computer.
WOOT
It’s a much cooler theme than the nasties that come with xp. Thanks for spreading the word.
kool makes my pc look kool
Great theme!
But does the “Show Desktop” shortcut not work for anyone else? I hope it’s not just me
Which shortcut?
My show desktop shortcut works fine.
[…] If you noticed that my Start bar is black and want to know how to do that, click here. […]
[…] seems the problem was all of the StumbleUpon traffic for my Royale Noir: A Secret XP Theme Uncovered post: I recently changed the post slug - I wrote a redirect in my .htaccess file but I missed […]
SUPER (some video converter) has an windows xp orange theme. I would like to see that one.
It is amazing that you are still getting comments on this post a year later. Wild!
It really is amazing - but this post generate the second most amount of traffic on my site!
Holy crap…now it is going on a year and six months…well, almost.
Nice one!
wow, I’ve been gone quite long. 160K pageviews! congrats! where did the traffic come from? digg?
Nope, StumbleUpon!
Wow that’s cool. And btw, I’m using that theme right now!
i need help.
who know to reduce the bandwith of windows xp updated?
as i know they take 20% from our bandwith for the update..
help me plz.
OK…I’ve downloaded this thing a number of times. But it isn’t totally working. I keep seeing screen shots that people have posted all over the place where the start MENU is a dark color. I get the beautiful noir colors for the bar at the bottom and around the windows, but my start menu keeps coming up white.
Any ideas???
Sounds like you have an issue with your install…
I would suggest a fresh install (easier said then done, I know).
lol longest running thread, as I to have just come across this.
Very nice theme pack thanks for the info.
It is a long thread. I always get an email update since I subscribed to the comments…and this has been around a long time.
it is quite long (that’s what she said)
and i’m still subscribed to the comments for this post after all this time lol…
LOVE IT! Downloaded in mere seconds and looks great! Thanks for the link!