The format of accelerator table resources

Raymond Chen

Continuing in the extremely sporadic series on the format of resources, today we’ll take a look at accelerator tables. This topic is so simple, I’ll cover both 16-bit and 32-bit resources on the same day!

In 16-bit Windows, the format of an accelerator table resource was simply an array of ACCEL structures.

typedef struct tagACCEL {
    BYTE fVirt;
    BYTE bPadding; /* making the padding explicit */
    WORD key;
    WORD cmd;
} ACCEL, *LPACCEL;

This array is the same array you would pass to the CreateAcceleratorTable, with one important difference: The fVirt of the last entry in the accelerator resource has its high bit set to indicate that it is the end of the table.

The format of 32-bit accelerator table resources is nearly identical to its 16-bit counterpart. The only difference is the addition of an additional word of padding to bring the size of the structure up to a multiple of four bytes.

typedef struct tagACCEL_RESOURCE {
    BYTE fVirt;
    BYTE bPadding; /* making the padding explicit */
    WORD key;
    WORD cmd;
    WORD wPadding; /* making the padding explicit */
} ACCEL_RESOURCE;

Once again, the last entry is marked by setting the high bit of the fVirt member. The extra word of padding adds a second obstacle to taking the resource data and passing it to the CreateAcceleratorTable function to create the accelerator table manually. Not only do you have to strip off the high bit of the fVirt, you also have to convert the table to an array of ACCEL structures and pass the converted table to the CreateAcceleratorTable function.

That’s all there is to the format of accelerator table resources. I told you it was pretty simple.

Raymond Chen

Follow