Royale (theme)

Royale (theme)

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Royale (theme)

Energy Blue desktop, featuring the new Royale theme.

Royale (also known as "Media Center style" and the blue version is also known as "Energy Blue") is a GUI art concept produced by Microsoft and introduced in 2004 directed for Windows Media Center desktops and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Tablet PCs. It is composed of a new wallpaper (inspired by Windows XP Bliss), a desktop theme and skins. The concept presents brilliant and relucent blue and green colors.

Availability
Appearance
Royale Noir / Zune theme
See also
References
External links

Availability

The Energy Blue theme was made available in December 2004 and is available for everyone. However, it has a limitation that can only be installed on a Windows Media Center computer. It is possible to install it on non-Media Center Editions of Windows XP by manually expanding the installation cabinet file. In 2005 the download was made only available for Windows Genuine Advantage users. Due to the freeware nature of this package it is being delivered on popular download websites already hacked, such as Softpedia. However, on April 7 2005, Microsoft New Zealand made the visual style available to the general public from this page, along with some other related resources. (It now appears to be removed from the list of available items to download, at least for some users.) The theme Royale, which is designed for Windows XP, is very similar; the shell-style is slightly different. The wallpapers for the New Zealand theme are available for download through Windows Genuine Advantage on the Microsoft website.

All Energy Blue resources were incorporated in Windows Media Center 2005 edition. Due to the introduction of the Aero interface design in Windows Vista, it is unlikely that this theme will be incorporated in future Windows versions.

Appearance

Also known as Royale or Media Center style, the new theme is a redesign of the original Luna with the brilliant and relucent concept. It features a mix of dark blue colors combined with the new wallpaper.

The new Energy Bliss wallpaper is heavily inspired by the original Bliss but now is generated artificially with computer graphics (CG) rendering. It features a vivid, faux-reflective color scheme with intense blues and greens.

Microsoft released a Windows Media Player visualization and skin. The visualization is available for free at WMPlugins.com and is specifically for version 10.0. The skin was released in Experience Pack for Tablet PC and is available for free but has a closed-install for Windows CE devices. It is also possible to hack the cabinets and get it running for Windows XP.

The skins, like all msstyles skins, use CSS for layout.

Royale Noir / Zune theme

Royale Noir theme desktop.

Zune theme desktop, featuring the new orange start button.

The Royale Noir and Royale Zune themes are two similar themes by Microsoft that appear to be based on the Energy Blue theme.

Both look like darkened versions of Energy Blue. The Zune theme was the first to include a different colour start button other than the green XP one or the original grey one from the Classic theme. As Royale Noir was leaked (as it is noted for some imperfections^[1]) and was not finalized by Microsoft a few weeks later it was officially released as a new desktop theme to accompany the release of its new Zune media player. Instead of having a blackish and bluish to purple tint, Royale Zune displayed a brown to light shadow style. Each theme has a slightly different colour scheme. For example, Noir has a black start button, which changes to green when the mouse hovers over it, and Zune has an orange start button.

It is not known whether or not Royale Noir was a beta for Royale Zune. However, this is most likely not the case, since it can be said that Luna is the inspiration (beta-like) for Royale/ Energy Blue.

The initial release of the Zune theme had a problem with file allocation in its shell theme which resulted in a false colouring in the task pane on the left hand side of Windows Explorer. Royale Noir doesn't suffer from this problem. This issue has apparently been resolved in later distributions of the theme.