Help-Setting Up XP+ Lazarus to appear like own OS

[Demon-Seed]

Hi,
Now that I got that great emu Lazarus under control...(well i need to try other emus) but Mame works great. I am starting to look at how I can have my windows xp boot directly into Lazarus and not show gui or signs of xp if possible.(unless I exit Lazarus) I am not sure how to do this..can any one help?

thanks
JIM

[Howard_Casto]

Well, unfortunately there isn't a good way right now....  The best you can do is replace the shell entry in your win.ini file with lazarus.exe.....  If you do this, however you need to beable to gain access to your machine's files via a boot disk, because once you do it windows explorer won't show up unless you do a create proces.  

Other things you can do instead are autohide the start menu and turn off icons on the desktop.  

[Random24]

Actually, I made a change in the registry and have a specific user that auto-logs in.  The reg change is in the user section of the reg so that all I have to do is log out as that user and then log in as another user to get explorer as my shell.  The reg setting is HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon.  Look for a string entry called 'Shell'. If it is not there, create a string entry and name it 'Shell'. Set the value of this entry to the name and location of your shell. For Lazarus, the shell entry may be "C:\Lazarus\Lazarus.exe" or wherever your Lazarus executable is located. For explorer, the entry is simply

[Howard_Casto]

Interesting.....

You need to write that up in detail and submit it to the byoac faq.  That's the missing link to a lot of windoze setups.  

[Random24]

Here is a copy of what I submitted:

Getting a Front-end to run as a shell in XP and start with no user intervention
You cannot do this if your computer is part of a domain. It must only be part of a workgroup.

• Create a user that will be the auto-login user. (User should have admin rights at this time)
  
• Configure XP to automate the logon process if your computer is not part of a domain.
  
  
  
  • Click Start, click Run, and type control userpasswords2.
    
  • Clear the Users must enter a username and password to use this computer check box.
    
  • Click Apply.
    
  • Enter the user name and pwd you wish to automatically log on with, and then click OK.
    
  • Click OK again and you're all done.
    
  
  
• Setup your FE the way you want it.
  
• Open regedit and browse to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon"
  Look for a string entry called 'Shell'. If it is not there, create a string entry and name it 'Shell'. Set the value of this entry to the name and location of your Front-end. For Lazarus, the shell entry may be "C:\Lazarus\Lazarus.exe" or wherever your Lazarus executable is located. For explorer, the entry is simply "explorer.exe".
  
• Log out as the auto-login user and log back in as another user with administrative rights.
  
• Change the auto-login user to a standard user. (This way people don't have more access than you want them to have.)
  

[Demon-Seed]

Hi,
kool so it auto loads..but how do i get back to xp if I want? I am a little unclear there.

[Random24]

ctrl-alt-del, log out, log in as another user.
Or ctrl-alt-del, go to task manager, file, new task, and type explorer, click "ok", and explorer will open as the shell.

[Howard_Casto]

I believe there is also a hotkey you can hold during startup to force the login screen too.  It was in NT anyway, I'll have to see if it still works.  

[Demon-Seed]

Thx I will try it once I tweak Lazarus more!!

[simpleman46]

Something else some of you might want to look at is a tiny little program called ShellON.  It's basically a shell loader.

It can pop up a menu when you boot up that asks which shell to load.  And you can have it automatically load one if there's no user input.  It has a lot of other cool little features as well.

It's not intented for frontends... and I haven't tried it for this, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.

http://www.dx13.co.uk/shellon/index.htm

[Demon-Seed]

Hey I found this one too.,.I havent tried it or others yet

http://www.cronosoft.com/download/index.htm