ah glad you managed to get to the bottom of Elite crashing, i hunted around a bit more for info, i think i might have been thinking of the 'BBC Master' system or something, that was the only one that seemed to mention a second processor, but i couldn't find any more info about that breaking emulated Elite.
Yes there is a way to change your ship decals, it's just a single .png format graphic file that you can swap for your own .png, finding the file Oolite uses is a bit more complex now we're in the days of managed expansion packs though
i'm on Windows and if i install the 'griff ship bundle' from the Oolite expansion manager, if i open file explorer and navigate to:
C:\Oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns
i see the list of all my installed expansion packs in oxz format, the one we need to find is called
oolite.oxp.Griff.Griff_shipset_decals.oxz
to open the oxz we need to change the file extension from .oxz to .zip
once that's done we can double click on the file and it should open up and let us look inside, in the
Textures folder there's a png called
griff_decals_player.png
...replace that file with your own custom decal png image, you'll need to keep the exact filename and filetype otherwise Oolite will not be able to locate your new decal as it's name is hardcoded in the 'plist' files in all the ship expansions
keep your new decal to a 'power of 2' resolution, this is something like 256x256 pixels in size or 512x512 pixels etc
once you're done replacing the png, make sure to
change the file extension back from .zip to .oxz and restart oolite, the ship decal should have changed, if not, exit Oolite and start it again
holding down the Shift key on your keyboard from the moment the program starts loading up until the spinning cobra title screen appears - holding down shift in this way forces Oolite to clear its cache and reload all it's known expansion pack files again and so it will see any changes we've made to the files
if you want to change decal sizes and positions on the ship hull, you'll need to locate the oxz for that particular ship in
C:\Oolite\oolite.app\GNUstep\Library\ApplicationSupport\Oolite\ManagedAddOns
change the file extension to zip as above, then open the folder and look for the
shipdata.plist file in the
Config sub-folder. open it in a basic text editor (
not wordpad if on a PC as it mangles the file with hidden formatting data, notepad is OK to use, as well as notepad++ opensource text editor)
in the file there will be a list of settings for the '..-Player' version of the ship, look in the Shaders, Uniforms bit for the decal rotation and position settings:
what these settings mean
Decal1_Scale_Position = { type = vector; value = "0.396 0.39 8.5"; };
Decal1_Rotation = { type = "float"; value = 0.0; };
the 3 numbers in Scale_position are x-pos, y-pos, scale - scale is weird in that the smaller the number you use the bigger your decal is drawn on the ship, note that x and y pos refer to the ships texture image not the actual model mesh dimensions, I think in OpenGL, the bottom left corner of the image is 0.0 and opposite top right corner is 1.0, so an x y pos of 0.25, 0.5 is 1/4 of the way in from the left edge of the image and halfway up from the bottom, the skill is finding the right place where this would mean that the decal is actually drawn on the hull!
glad it's working!