No doubt about it, this is a ‘dark’ theme. Royale Noir is an almost exact copy of Royale except with a dark purplish tint. In my opinion, it was the most usable non-standard XP theme available.

It updated the cliché beveled look-and-feel if XP to a contemporary glossy style, whilst keeping similar color schemes and layouts. Without a doubt, XP Media Center’s Royale theme was a huge improvement over Luna. This skin has not been released to anyone outside Microsoft, until now. If you already have Royale installed, you’ll need to remove it as both of these skins share the same name. 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. 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. The result is an aesthetic black skin named “Royale Noir”, it even works with Office 2003. W3bbo writes,ĭuring Royale‘s development (the XP Media Center theme), the graphic artists also produced a black version of the skin, sans the overused “glass” effect. After some dedicated searching, he finally uncovered this mystery Windows XP theme by Microsoft. One theme to rule them all.ĭevoted Channel9 member W3bbo spotted an interesting theme on one of the “ people_ready” television commercials airing in the Kingdoms. Now, a young hobbit man by the name of W3bbo saw light of this unheard of theme, and traveled far and wide to uncover its mysteries.

It was believed to be too powerful for public consumption and forever archived in the servers at 1 Microsoft Way. 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. If you don’t fancy the back story, skip directly to download.

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