From: MORRIS JP <jpmorris AT csm DOT uwe DOT ac DOT uk>
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 1997 13:30:40 GMT
Message-Id: <199703031330.NAA27233@milly>
To: opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Subject: [opendos] OpenDOS Startup logo
Sender: owner-opendos AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Precedence: bulk


For those of you who are interested,

I have been fiddling about to produce a startup screen for OpenDOS, similar
to Windows 95.

It is quite system-dependent, and does not animate.
The core of the system is a device driver I found somewhere that traps the
int29 calls used to display information on the screen while the config.sys
is being processed.  This takes up 192 bytes.

Then I wrote a program in C that switches to MCGA mode and displays a file
called OpenInit.Raw.  This is started using the INSTALL command.

Unfortunately, some drivers do not use the int29h interface and write directly
to the screen, such as EMM386 and my soundcard drivers.

I have got around this by making the first few lines of the screen black and
re-defining the font so it is 1 pixel high and all black.

Worse, one of the soundcard drivers changes back to text mode later on.
But overall, it does give me something nice to look at while my
cray-optimised SCSI drivers start up.

Other people's configurations may last all the way through to the autoexec.bat
file.

If anyone is interested I can make the toolkit (binaries, source, gif2raw)
available.

Nice startup screens would be welcome, though.
Currently mine is the bunny scene from Doom, with an aircraft trailing the
words 'Opendos 7.0.1 initialising'.

If anyone is brave enough to render/draw DJ Delorie's chrome brontosaurus..