Booting to Mame or FE

[brian nalley]

I am in the process of building a cabinet, and trying to narrow down my Front End... ArcadeFX, Emulaxian, Raging Dragon, and a French one called A-Player are the ones I am playing with. I like how A-Player will start up with a movie...this is a feature I think would be cool to have on a Cabinet. Anyway, I was wondering if there is a way to have windows boot right to a Front-End or a specific program? I am a bit new to this stuff (hence not using a DOS based FE, which every cabinet int he world seems to run =)

Thanks for the help!

Brian

[Dr. Jay]

I'm in windows 98se.  I just make a shortcut to what I want to boot in the startup folder, (in the startbar).  Now if I could figure out how to make the startbar not display in windows during the boot!?!

[joe]

i dont know if this will work or not but make the taskbar autohide so it only displays when u hover ur mouse over it. dont know if it will work but u could give it a try if u havent already.

[Howard_Casto]

For the record RD will start up with a movie as well just name it intro.mpeg and put it in your RD directory.  I believe emuwizard and aFX wil do this as well.

[Dr. Jay]

Thanks, but actually, even if you have auto hide on, the taskbar displays until windows is done loading, then it hides.  I'm needing it to be gone the whole time.  -Dr. J

[Howard_Casto]

this can only be done one way

you have to set your fe as the shell rather than explorer.exe in the win.ini file.

[Brian]

Wow, RD will run a movie..very cool!

Now to figure out how to adjust my .ini file )

[Dr. Jay]

Howard:  How do you setup the win.ini?  I opened it up and this is what I got:

[Desktop_Shell]
Current=Win

I'm in Win98se.  I played around with it, trying to set it as the FE's exe, and path, but I don't really understand this.  
Thanks, Dr. J

[)p(]

Dr J. just replace shell=explorer.exe in your system.ini with shell=your complete path/program.exe

Peter

[Dr. Jay]

>p<:  I tried what you suggested and I must not be doing something right.  I tried it with shell=c:\emuwizard.exe.  Emuwizard loads up fine in this directory before I change the system.ini.  After I change it though, it loaded up to my wall paper, then it tried to load emuwizard, but instead said that no games could be found, and then that windows initialization failed, and then it stopped.  I could still move the mouse around, but there were no icons, no right clicking menu, no task bar.  So I changed it back in dos and everything boots up normal again.  Any ideas?  Thanks

[SirPoonga]

>p<:

[Dr. Jay]

sirpoonga:
  You must have skipped over this line when reading my post:

"Emuwizard loads up fine in this directory before I change the system.ini."