Have you ever seen a nice theme and thought to yourself ‘Hmm those icons look good, the themes ok but I’d have made the background X. I wish I had those icons to assign to my own theme, how I want it to be’.

Well, this is exactly what you can do to any theme.

Ok things you will need.

Nokia 6600 Theme Studio at Nokia Site

UnMakeSIS from here : http://mitglied.lycos.de/atzplzw/

MBMWizard Sorry no URL, try searching for it in http://www.google.com

Getting Started:

Download or get the theme you want to unpack. What I would suggest and do myself, is to copy it to your desktop. That way if all goes wrong you still have the original.

Now open up UnMakeSIS, the screen will look like this :

Now open your theme by clicking ‘Open’ and viewing your Desktop to select the .sis file.

When the file has been loaded The screen will now show this :

Two files will be shown, an .MBM file and a .skn file. It’s the .MBM we’re interested in. So go ahead and click ‘Extract Files’. A new folder will be created on your Desktop (Or where ever your working from) called ‘System’. In there you will find the two files shown above.

Now close UnmakeSIS we are finished with it on this project.

Go and view the ‘System’ folder, there are a couple of other folders to go through first before you find the .MBM file. Once you do, Cut or Copy it, come back into the ‘System’ folder and paste.

You don’t have to do this I just think it’s easier than going through to many folders.

Now open up MBM Wizard, it will look like this :

Now we need to ‘Import’ the theme’s .MBM file we want to open. So go to the pull down menu and select ‘Import’ (see picture below).

Find the .MBM file and click ok. A status box will appear and all the names of the components will be shown as they are unpacked. The Wizard will now look like this :

Great, now we have the files we want just got to save them.

Click the ‘Select All’ button, all the files will highlight. Now click the ‘Save selected as bmp’ button. Select a place to save them, it will default to our ‘System’ folder. Select ‘Save’ another status box will popup and the icons will be saved, along with the backgrounds, colours, corner sections, everything used in the make up of that theme.

Now close the MBM Wizard as you are done with this program to. The icons are yours for the taking.
As a check, go to your desktop and browse the ‘System’ folder.
The .MBM file will still be present as will a load of other files, similar to below :

You will notice all the parts have numbered names, which is ok but if you clever and want to make or alter themes quicker, read on…….

A quick way to update an existing themes icons:

I'm personally not very good at making my own icons from scratch, I can do it but it's a long and tiring job. Recently I have taken to downloading other peoples themes, thanks guys  and breaking them down to see what's inside them (the above instructions told you how).

I then decide what to keep and what not to, the icons are a favorite.

Now, if any of you have browsed through your PC and viewed the installed Nokia Theme Studio folder you may have spotted the next bit. We’ll assume that you have installed onto C:, it could be any drive letter so substitute as necessary.

Go to C: - Program Files - Theme Studio - Data - Skinsdir and look at what you see.

You will see a folder for every theme that is currently in the studio. Open up any one of these folders and you will see the individual parts used to make the theme, eg. backgrounds, icons & masks, colours, clock numbers etc. the list goes on.

You will also see each part has it's own name, eg. the idle screen picture is called 'Idle Background_image1'.

Now change or alter this image in Studio and this image is updated. But, what if we do it now?

Alter the image out of Theme Studio by double clicking on it now, opening it with your favourite painting package, then save the changes. This won't do anything, yet! Not until you next go and create the sis file for this theme again.

Go ahead and try it, alter the main or idle screen, start Theme Studio, double click that theme so it's shown on screen and straight away click 'create sis' then send it to your phone and the change will be there.

Now apply this in a different way, for the icons maybe.

You have a set of icons you want to use, eg. lots of them which would take ages to open individually in a painting program and save one by one in Studio. They are already named correctly for their proper places within the theme, eg. qgn_menu_am_cxt_image4 is the menu icon. Open the folder of the theme you want them to go with and paste. There will already be a file of that name present so click ok to over-write, don't forget the mask to : qgn_menu_am_cxt_mask_image4 and then open Studio, double click the theme to view it and then click create sis again without touching the ‘Edit’ button.

The new icon will be added to the theme.

So, if we take our first project, Project Get-Icons. Open an existing theme to view the file names and have our ripped icon folder open to, we can copy and paste the correct names from one icon to the other. So that when they are copied and pasted into a theme folder they over-write the icon we want to alter. Simple, fast and very fun!

I hope you have managed to follow this tutorial correctly. Once you have done a few it gets easier and once the icons are renamed, next time that is one step you no longer have to do.

Have fun theme’ing!