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Removing ALL Desktop Icons in Win98 w/o TweakUI
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IG-88:
After doing some searchin' on the web I found a quick and easy way to hide the desktop icons in WIN98 that are not deletable without using TweakUI. I haven't tried this in 2K or XP yet but I will. This is a registry hack so take it easy....

Go to Start > Run, type in "regedit" then

Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ Current Version \ Policies \ Explorer
From the menu select Edit > New > DWORD value
Name it NoDesktop

Double-click this entry and give it the value 1

Close the registry editor and reboot your computer

To restore the Icons on the desktop, you have to change the value of the NoDesktop Key to 0.

It worked like a champ and took about 2 minutes. This should help any of you that are using Mame32 & it's FE alone to hide some of that "Windows" look.
IG-88:
Well, I just tried this on my 2k machine and it works fine. I'm guessing it will work on XP too but I'll check tomorrow.

I should also say that if you want some of your desktop icons available but not seen ( like "my computer" or the "recycle bin" ) you and just drag them onto/into the "Start" button before performing the reg hack.
hsr:
Another Win98 option to hide the desktop is to not use it all.  In c:\windows, resides your system.ini file.

You can edit this file to have the line that reads:

shell=explorer.exe

to

shell=mame32.exe (or really any other executable).

In my case, the computer boots directly into Mala with shell=mala.exe.  I saved the modified system.ini as system.mla (for Mala) and retained a copy of the original un-modified system.ini as system.win

I made a bootable floppy, and copied system.win and system.mla to it.  Then made two batch files also stored on the floppy.

mala.bat (which contains)
copy system.mla c:\windows\system.ini

and

win.bat (which contains)
copy system.win c:\windows\system.ini

I put the floppy in the drive of the computer inside my cabinet.  Ran mala.bat from a: then reboot from the hard disc.  This launches directly into Mala.

If I need to do any maintenance, I can just boot from the floppy and run win.bat from a: then reboot from the hard disc.  This will boot me back in Windows98.

I'm going to play with your method IG-88 and see which I like better and/or which one leaves more RAM available.

Thanks for the tip.
hsr:

--- Quote from: hsr on December 30, 2006, 11:24:37 pm ---You can edit this file to have the line that reads:

shell=explorer.exe

to

shell=mame32.exe (or really any other executable).
--- End quote ---

A quick note on this:  The executable and supporting files (like mame32.exe, etc) or a copy of, need to reside in windows directory for this to work.
WareWolF:
Add mame to your path and it should run without having to be copied into you windows directory.

Just put

Path=%path%;c:\mame32

in your autoexec.bat
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