Making New Track Screens:

This tutorial was in the Tutorial Studio when that file was available at the Lightning site. I noticed that I had made some small errors in that file when I was making screens and I think I have corrected those errors succesfully in this version of the tutorial.
[an image editor will be needed, as well as Winmip]
[all other needed files can be found in this screens.rar]
1 - Make a new folder on your harddrive. Let's say you call it screens
2 - Unpack screens.rar to this folder.
3 - If you are using PSP, you can skip this step because I have already put the needed palette files in PSP form in the screens.rar file. If you use another program I hope you can save palettes. You will need to save three palette files :
            - One called screens_color0.pal. To create this one load the file htshotc.bmp in your program and save the palette.
            - One called screens_194colors.pal. To create this one load the file hdiagram.bmp in your program and save the palette.
              
            - One called screens_bluetones.pal. To create this one load the file htshotg.bmp in your program and save the palette.
4 - The next thing you have to do is find or draw a good image that you want to use as the main track shot. You can try cooking up a good shot in 3doEd, you can look something up on the internet or even use your own artistical skills. It's best to have an image of at least 640 by 480 pixels. Save this image in 16 million colors as a .bmp file. Name it something like main_shot.bmp.
5 - Now you have to make another image file, the one we are going to use for the track map images. You don't have to make a track map per se, a nice logo would do as well. Make something pretty ! This time, make sure you have at least 183 by 104 pixels. Again, save it as a 16 million color .bmp and name it something like track_map.bmp. What is important to know is that everything that will have RGB color values 0,0,0 will be transparent in the game. So you can draw a track map like in the original DOS game with very light grey on a background of RGB 0,0,0 and only the track will appear on screen and not the background.
6 - Now we are going to make the actual track screens for in the game. I will deal with these one by one and tell you exactly what to do. So here it goes:

Main Track Shots [DOS & Windows versions]:

A - In your paint program, open the main_shot.bmp you made earlier. Copy and paste as a new image. Resize this new image to 640x480 pixels. Load the screens_color0.pal color palette. When asked, choose 'Optimized Median Cut' and either 'Nearest Color' or 'Error Diffusion' [depending on what looks best]. Save as htshotc.bmp and close.

B - Copy and paste main_shot.bmp as a new image again. This time, resize the new image to 320x200 pixels. Load the screens_color0.pal color palette. When asked, choose 'Optimized Median Cut' and either 'Nearest Color' or 'Error Diffusion' [depending on what looks best]. Save as ltshotc.bmp and close.

C - Copy and paste main_shot.bmp as a new image again. This time, resize the new image to 447x330 pixels. Decrease the amount of colors to 256. When asked, choose 'Optimized Median Cut' and either 'Nearest Color' or 'Error Diffusion' [depending on what looks best]. This time, save it as a .pcx file ! [this one will go straight into the game]. Name the file mtshotc.pcx and close.

Track Maps [DOS & Windows versions]:

D - Open the track_map.bmp you made earlier. Copy and paste as a new image. Resize to 183x104 pixels. Load the screens_194colors.pal palette. Save as hdiagram.bmp and close.

E - Open the track_map.bmp you made earlier. Copy and paste as a new image. Resize to 89x44 pixels. Load the screens_194colors.pal palette. Save as ldiagram.bmp and close.

Track Screens Blue Background [DOS Only]:

F - Open the htshotc.bmp you made earlier. Copy and paste as a new image. Increase color depth to 16 million colors. Now choose 'Colorize' and adjust 'Hue' to 140 and 'Saturize' to 80. Adjust 'Brightness' to +20 and 'Contrast' to -20. Now add a 35% transparent layer to the image filled with RGB 0,0,140. Merge the layers. Load the screens_bluetones.pal color palette. Save as htshotg.bmp. Don't close yet.

G - Increase color depth to 16 million colors on your freshly made htshotg.bmp and resize to 320x200. Load the screens_bluetones.pal color palette. Save as ltshotg.bmp and close.
7 - Start up WinMip and choose converting .bmp files to .stp and convert all your freshly made .bmp files to .stp files.
8 - Rename the file htshotg.stp to htshotg.str
      Rename the file ltshotg.stp to ltshotg.str
9 - Put both the .str files, all four .stp files, the mtshotc.pcx file and the map.pcx file to the .dat file of your track, repack it and test the new screens.