Thanks for the guide! I tried to follow the tips in the original post, as much as I could.
Unfortunately I discovered some issues.
First off, the
Windows 7 Boot Updater didn't seem to work properly on my system (Win 7x64). Nothing I did seemed to work for it. All changes made were gone with the next boot. The animation and (c) Microsoft persisted. The only exception was I managed to somehow remove the "Starting Windows" text. I did download the latest version, but no luck.
I'm wondering if it has something to do with Thai language being installed on my system (but that's more for the fonts, still running primarily EN-US). In any case the whole issue is moot because I've decided to boot with
"no GUI boot" enabled via
Win+R (Run) then "
MSconfig".
Secondly, I had problems with the instantsheller, because I am using
Attract Mode for a frontend. The instasheller demands an executable with a *.exe only and without flexibility, no parameters, which (for whatever reason) meant Attract Mode wasn't loading any configuration files. I got around it by
hacking the registry instead. Navigate to:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
and at the 'Shell' key entry, replace "explorer.exe" with "c:\attract\attract.exe -c c:\attract". This tells Attract Mode where the working directory and config files are! This worked well, a success.
However, for a number of reasons, I decided that I wanted to keep my explorer/desktop options open. So, I
reverted "shelling" the AM frontend and
went back to traditional, loading explorer.exe as normal, and then launching AM from the Startup folder (and pinned it to the Start Bar for good measure).
You can access the Startup folder by
Win+R (run) then type "
shell:startup". This opens the startup folder where you can place shortcuts (and other cool stuff like autohotkey scripts). Drop in shortcuts to the programs you want to automatically run at startup there.
I placed a
shortcut to a batch file (AM.bat, in the c:\attract directory, more on that below) on my
desktop (right-click on file, choose "send to desktop"), to launch Attract Mode. This shortcut has a simple "shortcut key" combo (Ctrl+Alt+1, do this by right-clicking on the shortcut to edit it's properties). This makes it easy to launch Attract Mode from desktop (or arcade cab) later. I then
copied that shortcut into the Startup folder.
Next problem, the taskbar wanted to play up. Every time I booted into AM, the taskbar would sneakily come up, right at the end, and "steal focus" away from AM. Even when hidden, the very top of the taskbar would stick up and steal focus. To get focus back to AM I had to Alt-Tab, not very slick.
I tried using Shybar, but it didn't work. Problem persisted.
Eventually I tamed the taskbar using
nircmd.exe (
https://nircmd.nirsoft.net/), a powerful but light command line utility. It provides some great tools to help launch programs, bring them to the front or hide them, including the taskbar. My batch file (AM.bat), which lives in the c:\attract directory, ended up looking like this:
@ECHO OFF
cd c:\attract
nircmd.exe exec show "attract.exe -c c:\attract"
nircmd.exe win focus process attract.exe
nircmd.exe win settopmost process attract.exe 1
nircmd.exe win hide class Shell_Traywnd
exit
These commands launch AM, force windows to focus on it, makes it as the top process, and finally hides the taskbar. I'm not sure if all of the commands above were 100% necessary, maybe just the first and the last one ("nircmd.exe win hide class Shell_Traywnd"), as that seemed to settle everything down.
Setup like this, with a clean desktop, is almost like having the frontend as a shell. It leaves me some more flexibility to fiddle with stuff, I can always shell it later when I'm done.