Ah, good ol' days!
Went to that topic and noticed you mentioned a 1x2px image failed to produce gradient. I noticed too that the minimum size would be 2px on either side, probably because a gradient can't be obtained from a single color in either direction.
And dunno why but I feel it in my gut that this was an intentional feature back then even if undocumented; maybe they wanted to keep an ace up their sleeve for whatever purpose. How many such undocumented features and APIs did they ultimately reveal at some point, after years? Not to mention the Easter Eggs in Win9x, very well crafted tricks that regular users never would've discovered other than by lucky accident, if ever.
I wonder how the Win9x gradient titlebars were being drawn. Most likely not from pre-made bitmap images but possibly by using that CopyImage() hidden feature with ad-hoc bitmaps created from the theme color data in the registry.
As it happens I do have a Win8.x machine around, if it should still work, but it'd be a hassle to connect all required peripherals to it and perform some tests. Long gone are the days when I would run 3-4 machines at the same time, all connected to a LAN and seamlessly manipulating files between two machines from a third one.
But it sure would be interesting to find out if this issue started with Win8 or is solely the undoing of Win10.
In regard to skills, I was coming from a few years of Z80 machine code, where a Spectrum only had 16 colors and creating intermediary tones was a hack job, more so when only two colors were allowed in a 8x8px cell.Those times taught me not to waste storage space and memory, hence the usage of extra small bitmaps for creating skinned GUIs in AHK. That gradient feature allowed for the creation of interesting patterns, not only from two-color bitmaps. If you look in the
res folder of MyDiary you'll see the small
passSplash bitmaps, and if you run the script you'll see the nice skinned password dialog. It's a real shame to lose that feature, I have no idea if there is any direct replacement for it that would be officially documented and available in all Win versions from 95 to 10, not to mention Wine.
Don't you feel that the entire world has been constantly dumbed down for quite some years already, culminating with this... hell, I'd rather not go there.