Can I create full-screen color overlay effects in windows?

Question

I remember my old Radeon graphics drivers, which had a lot of overlay effects or color filters (whatever they called) that would display the screen, for example. sepia tones or negative colors. My current NVIDIA card does not seem to have this feature, so I wondered if it could be made for Vista.

I don’t know if there is a way to connect to the window rendering engine or, alternatively, to the NVIDIA drivers to achieve this effect. Although it would be great to just change the color, it would be even better to change the color based on its screen coordinates or perform other more diverse functions. An example would be colors that are more unsaturated the longer they are from the center of the screen.

I do not have a specific use case, so I cannot provide much more information. Basically, I'm just curious if there is anything to work with in this area.

Answer 1

You can have a full-screen multi - level window on top of everything and go through click events. However, this hacker and slower compared to what can be done by getting a hook in WDM displaying the DirectX context. However, this is not yet possible, since Microsoft does not provide any public interface.

The Flip 3D utility does this, though, but even where the functionality is not in the program, it is in the WDM DLL called ordinal (a hidden / undocumented function, obviously, since it does not serve any other purpose), so there’s another dead end, from where I did not bother to dig deeper.

On this front, the best we can do is wait for some kind of official API.