Summary: Hiding XP / Booting to your Emulator / Optimizing boot

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clhug:
Finally got around to setting this up on my MAME box and have a few comments and questions.

Thanks to M3talhead for the "War Games" intro idea! I found an MP3 of it on the web and edited a couple phrases together. On bootup mine now has WOPR saying "Greetings Professor. Shall we play a game?" I took out the "Falken" name so whoever was booting it up, it sounds like it's talking to that person. I almost took out the "Professor" part too but just plain "Greetings" didn't flow as well into the "Shall we play a game?" line.

Now I'd like to find something like WOPR saying "Goodbye Professor" for shutdown. Any other recommendataions for a good shut down sound for a MAME cabinet? OH, wait!! (Just thought of this as I'm writing.) If I can find it as an MP3, maybe the sound the PAC-Man game makes when Pac Man dies. <wait> Okay I just searched and found the sound as a .wav file, but it's too short for what I'd really like. Any other suggestions for a shutdown sound still very welcome!

Bootskins doesn't work on my PC. I get the BSOD. I opted for the simple modifying boot.ini to include the /bootlogo /noguiboot switches. I still borrowed the MAME boot screen from bootskins though for my boot screen. I don't get the animated progress bar but I can live without that. I like the MAME boot up screen so I'm not going to do the PCI card thing. Also, when starting from a cold start (I have a Bits Ltd. SmartStrip) the monitor doesn't warm up until after the BIOS screen on the PC is already past so I don't have to worry about seeing the BIOS text either.

What I ended up doing for hiding the cursor was to make my background black and then make a black cursor, so you can't see the cursor on bootup but if I exit Mamewah I can still see the cursor to navigate around the task bar and start menu. And if I right-click on the bare desktop to bring up the Desktop Settings dialog to change the background color, the black mouse pointer shows up over the dialog very easy. Then of course I change the background color to something else to work on the PC.

Which brings me to my first question. Even though I've set the task bar to "auto-hide" it still appears for a few seconds before Mamewah loads (just loading Mamewah from the Startup group). I also tried leaving auto-hide off and just manually sizing the task bar down until you just see it as a thin line but it doesn't retain that small of a profile through a reboot. Any way to mabye color the task bar black too?

Next question, to go along with my shutdown sound, is it possible to give Windows XP a shut down screen like you could in Win 98? I'm thinking of maybe still using the same MAME boot screen from bootskins but change the text about "System Loading, Please Stand By..." to read "System Shutting Down" or just "Goodbye" or something.

Tiger-Heli:

--- Quote from: clhug on June 19, 2006, 11:00:50 pm ---Which brings me to my first question. Even though I've set the task bar to "auto-hide" it still appears for a few seconds before Mamewah loads (just loading Mamewah from the Startup group). I also tried leaving auto-hide off and just manually sizing the task bar down until you just see it as a thin line but it doesn't retain that small of a profile through a reboot. Any way to mabye color the task bar black too?

--- End quote ---
Using MAMEwah as a shell instead of Explorer should take care of this, but I haven't tried it, and I guess you probably weren't crazy about it since it was mentioned previously.

You can probably get a black taskbar with some of the WindowBlinds themes from StarDock, but I have never really liked their software.

Simpler solution - Couldn't you select Windows Classic Theme and then use the appearance tab to make the taskbar black?

clhug:
Yeah, I didn't really want to mess with making Mamewah the shell. Other than the task bar now, I've got everything else completely hidden on startup.

Good idea about using classic theme. I just tried that and I was able to make the task bar black by changing to classic theme and then setting 3D objects to black. But it affects ALL 3D dialog boxes which makes the system very hard to use. So for now, I'll suffer with havin the task bar appear for a couple seconds on startup.

Also, I wanted to add another tip regarding adding the custom cursors (whether you do transparent, or the dot or black, or whatever) to the Default user profile to prevent the cursor from appearing on the login screen too. For the manual method, instead of manually creating the HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Cursors key and subkeys, just use Regedit to export the HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Cursors key to a .reg file, then edit that file in notepad and change the [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Cursors] line to read [HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\Cursors], then reimport the .reg file. Much quicker than creating all those keys manually.

Also, if you do still decide to create the .Default cursor registry keys manually, the only ones you really need to create are the ones for AppStarting, Arrow, and Wait. It's highly unklikely any of the other cursor types would show up in the few seconds the default cursors are shown on bootup with the auto-login turned on.

Still looking for any good suggestions on a shut down sound. I've gone with Pac Man dieing for now, but would like something better.

And if anybody knows how to create a shutdown screen in Windows XP...

So, now I've got the boot up sequence right. Now I've just got to dig into Mamewah to get all the fancy stuff working like the preview movies and sound. I've got a lot of reading to do.

Thanks again!

Chris:

--- Quote from: clhug on June 20, 2006, 08:49:31 pm ---Good idea about using classic theme. I just tried that and I was able to make the task bar black by changing to classic theme and then setting 3D objects to black. But it affects ALL 3D dialog boxes which makes the system very hard to use. So for now, I'll suffer with havin the task bar appear for a couple seconds on startup.

--- End quote ---

Here's an idea: make it grey, and set the background to be the grey-on-black grid that many arcade games flashed for a couple of seconds on startup. The taskbar will get lost against the grid and it will give it a bit of arcade flavor.

--Chris

Zeppo:

--- Quote from: Capthowdy on May 13, 2006, 07:09:18 am ---
--- Quote from: Level42 on May 13, 2006, 04:40:23 am ---Yes, but generaly the idea is that Mamewah is configured to START explorer.exe upon exiting Mamewah. And that's not working.

Minwah where are you, we need your help !

--- End quote ---

HA!! I've figured it out!!! It's 7:00AM and I've been up all friggin night!! But I got it to work!

mamewah_v161\ctrlr\default.ini

************
EXIT_WITH_CHOICE
EXIT_TO_WINDOWS         "DIK_ESCAPE"
EXIT_AND_RUN_APP
EXIT_AND_REBOOT
EXIT_AND_SHUTDOWN
************

guess where "DIK_ESCAPE" needs to be! That's right...make it look like this:

************
EXIT_WITH_CHOICE
EXIT_TO_WINDOWS
EXIT_AND_RUN_APP      "DIK_ESCAPE"
EXIT_AND_REBOOT
EXIT_AND_SHUTDOWN
************

TADA!!! I'm delirious! I'm going to bed!!! :dizzy:

--- End quote ---

Ok, I did all that, but my mamewah still doesn't run the explorer when it exits.
All I get is a black screen with the cursor.
I hit ctrl-alt-delete, and use that to run explorer.
Explorer will run, but then it goes back to mamewah for some reason.
Then when I exit mamewah the second time, it goes to the explorer.

Also, I can't get the MAME boot screen to come up using the Stardocks Bootskin.
I followed the directions, got it imported, hit apply, it says it is now using the mame skin, but when I reboot, the screen just stays black until it boots into mamewah.

Anyways, thanks for an awesome guide!

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