This tutorial is for creating .cur files on XP. I haven't tried this on Vista/W7 but it should work for them too. I don't know how to make animated cursors, but who uses those anyway?

Create a 32x32 image of your cursor in your favourite image editing program. I will use a dot cursor as an example. I don't recommend you actually use this cursor because it's horrible as one.



Save your image as a .png and download png2ico (actually you can use anything that can save as .ico, I just do it this way). Convert your .png to .ico by running "png2ico dot.ico dot.png". Obviously replace the filenames with what you want.

Open the icon in a hex editor (I use XVI32). Jump to address 2 (assuming the first address is 0) and change the value to "02". This is so the file is seen as a cursor rather than an icon.



The values at offset 6/7 should both be 20 (32 in decimal). These are the icon dimensions.

Jump to address A (10 in decimal). This value is the X coordinate of the cursor hotspot (where clicks occur). In my example I am setting this to 02. Remember to convert your value to hexdecimal before inserting it (if you wanted to use the centre of the image, you would use 0F rather than 15). Repeat this at address C, the Y coordinate. Again, I am using 02 for this.



Now save your cursor as whatever.cur and move it to %WINDIR%\Cursors (%WINDIR% is usually C:\WINDOWS). Now you can select it from the Pointers tab in the mouse control panel.



Click ok and you're all done! If you want more information, take a look at Wikipedia. Get my finished cursor here.