Why the HELL is the pointer showing on start up!? Please Help!

[slapaham]

I had finally got the loading of Mamewah just how I'd like it - no sign of Windows at all, then I decided to make the boot up as efficient as possible. I did some defragments, stopped all the Windows services I didn't need and used Bootvis to optimise my booting. But ever since I did all this the mouse cursor appears. Instant Sheller did the job of hiding it before, so why doesn't it now!? My computer may boot that little bit faster but I'd rather it was slower and this darn mouse pointer disappear again!

It's so annoying. I even tried replacing the cursors in regedit. No luck. Then I tried replacing them in the Windows Cursors folder as well - still no luck. However hard I try that sodding white arrow still appears for a split second before the intro video of Mamewah. It may not be there for more than a blink of an eye but I feel it really spoils the feel of my cab!

Can anyone please help? PLEASE!!!!!!

[Ginsu Victim]

Have you tried the transparent cursor included with Mamewah?

[slapaham]

I'll give that a go this evening after work. Thanks for the advice. I have a feeling it won't work though as I tried using the black dot cursor that came with Instant Sheller and that didn't do any good! 

Is there any settings you'd advise I look at. Or anyway in particular that would be a good way of doing it? I have used regedit and control panel and also tried directly replacing the big white cursors in the Cursors directory in Windows - have you any tips? Might I be doing something wrong?

Thanks again for your help. I appreciate it!

[Thenasty]

use the invisible cursor. It's floating around somewhere...

[Ginsu Victim]

use the invisible cursor. It's floating around somewhere...

I have to quote myself from above:

Have you tried the transparent cursor included with Mamewah?

[david656]

The Program you want is Tweak UI it will mirror which ever pointer you have in windows onto the login screen so i mirrored a invisible cursor and then changed the windows one to the little dot so when loading you cannot see a cursor except for a split second before mamewah kicks in, if you prefer you can keep it all as invisible of course.

The Following link go's direct to the download 

http://www.filehippo.com/download/file/ed4d69c40e9cd269a76dbd27a702d9bad508adc2c3e35d3450ea9e044d0921eb 


edit : you may want to enable the Ctrl circle effect before applying so you can roughly see where the pointer is 

[slapaham]

Thanks for that! By the sounds of it, you've really nailed my problem on the head! I think the others didn't quite understand the problem and were just suggesting things I'd already tried (but I'm grateful they tried to help!)

I have kind of left this problem for now as I've been busy finishing off the controls for my cab - should be trying them out tomorrow for the first time! Once I've sorted that out and sorted out my romlist (downgrading and compiling a version 56 at the moment) - I'll try this and hopefully this will be the last piece of the puzzle!

Thanks a lot for this!

[Ginsu Victim]

I figured if you knew about Bootvis, you knew about Tweak UI.

[GameDork]

My machine flashes the windows desktop for an instant before mamewah appears.

Anything I can do with that?

[slapaham]

I'd follow what he suggested for me - as that is the problem I have too!

[cadmium]

As far as I know, the only way to prevent your desktop from showing up is to replace the Windows shell with your front-end. I suppose if you didn't want to go that far I suppose you could autohide your taskbar and remove all of the icons from your desktop, but I think the taskbar still shows itself on boot. I'm not sure.

For my cabinet, I followed the instructions here for replacing the windows shell with my FE (Maximus Arcade). Add a Mame inspired bootskin (free app from stardock) and the tweak ui tip from this thread, the only evidence you see of Windows from a cold boot is a split second mouse cursor and then you are in maximus. The instructions should be generic enough for any FE.

One thing that helped was I made my desktop solid black and I made my mouse cursor a black outline, so it's still usable for most things, but won't show up on the black background.

[slapaham]

It is slightly irratating that the pointer/cursor flashes up for a split-second before going into the frontend... for some reason it only started after I defraged the HD and used Bootvis before that, there was absolutely no flash of the cursor before... odd!

I guess I will have to live with it but if anyone does find a foolproof way around it, please let me know...!!