Mame frontend and Hide Windows XP advice please

[speterson]

Hi,

Im new on here.

Im setting up a mame / multi emulators (snes, atari etc..) for use with my 50" plasma, surround sound and 2 player X-Arcade joystick (which is in the post). I have all the roms and CHD's with graphic snapshots.

So far I have managed to get the boot skin working with the Mame and progress bar.

Welcome/logout screen removed, auto login working, replace with black background and mame logo using TweakUI.

Removed popup boxes etc...

I have a startup .wav sound. "Greetings proffesser, do you want to play a game?" edit from War Games.

Things on my list to do that I need advice help with...

Mouse removal

Start bar removal/hide options other than basic autohide

Video Startup - I have the start.AVI below and wish this to be played fullscreen on login without any dos boxes showing etc.
RetroBlast! - MAME Startup Video

Frontend help.

I would like a clean front end preferabley with an arcade machine monitor showing game pictures/videos etc.

Opinion's on the best Free/pay Frontends?

Thanks

Steve

 

[neorage]

initially to prevent start bar and such showing u can just prevent explorer.exe from running at startup.. as this is not needed to run applications, its just the windows frontend persay


tho cant remember off the top of my head how to do that ,..

as for running a front end.. perhaps to get a full screen video would be to run a script that would run a Flash Video of your avi in full screen (no tool bars and such)

as for the Frond Nav software no idea,,

hope that helps

 

[speterson]

Great Idea,

How would i stop explorer.exe running at startup

msconfig?

 

[speterson]

This looks like it will do it

AutoRuns for Windows

Or Maybe I can edit a registry setting myself

 

[neorage]

nope

cant remember of the top off muy head but i know a theming app like windows blidns or such used to run itself instead of explorer exe and it was simply just an edit of a libne of a file but canny remember myself

 

[speterson]

Auto runs is excellent

I have unticked the box under

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\Shell

Its amazing how much you can disable from this app.

I will disable mostly all the non essensial options as I am only using XP for mame.

Hopefully it will increase the startup loading time.

 

[Purity]

There's some info in the sticky about running the application as the shell

https://www.digitalworldz.co.uk/index.php?threads/183183/

Hopefully this may help

 

[speterson]

Yeah, thats useful.

So I now have no explorer and I can launch the front end from the registry. (explorer can be launch manually through task manager - run - explorer)

Need to figure out how to play the AVI from windows full screen, I know some front end can play a video at the start but I want to know all my options.

I guess windows media player must have some command line stuff attributes

Thanks

 

[speterson]

This looks like it will do it

AutoRuns for Windows

Or Maybe I can edit a registry setting myself

Think this program is just a viewer but it takes you to the registry so you can edit manually.