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Autorun Splash Software
by Geetesh Bajaj
Introduction
Good Old Autorun.inf
Create Your Own Autorun Splashes
AutoPlay Menu Studio
AtomPack
StarterFile
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Introduction
Splash - just a splash - no water, no drops and no dew. Just an
appearance on your monitor or LCD. Insert a CD or DVD in your drive
and pop comes the splash screen - in all its 'peacock feather'
colours. There are options galore, help menus, icons and choices
to click. To describe in a single word - 'elegant'. Need we say
more. Let's look at ways to create these splashes. Be warned though,
when the splash hits your screen, there will be no water. For that
experience, you may have to go visiting Hawaii, Goa or Bali!
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Good Old Autorun.inf
The world of binary splashes is activated by a small unpretending
file in the root of your CD or DVD - basically a text file with
the aspiring name of 'autorun.inf'.
This is what happens:
- You insert a CD or DVD in a drive.
- Windows searches for an autorun.inf file in the root.
- If it finds the file, it looks for an 'Open' statement in that
file.
- It executes that 'Open' statement, usually a executable to
activate a splash screen.
- The splash screen appears on the viewer's computer.
- Depending upon the interface, navigation and design, you are
presented with various options.
- You choose an option.
- An action associated with that option is activated.
- That's it!
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Create Your Own Autorun Splashes
What do you need to create such autorun splashes? You could use
a multimedia program like Director, Illuminatus, Mediator or Dazzler,
or you could try out a specialized autorun splash software. There
are options aplenty - let us check our options:
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AutoPlay Menu Studio
AutoPlay Menu Studio is from Indigo Rose, the same company which
makes Setup Factory. In many ways, AutoPlay Menu Studio is more
than an autorun splash program - it creates multiple page menus
with gusto - good enough to allow creation of an entire demo or
presentation within its precincts.
 Now
in version 3, it supports templates, a range of actions to trigger
anything from playing your presentation to executing registry functions.
You can also input video as part of an autorun splash and create
scrolling text boxes. Templates are provided to easily create multilingual
splashes or multiple page splashes. A very important feature is
that AutoPlay Menu Studio lets you designate a folder on your hard
disk as a Virtual CD ROM.
In fact, there is no close competition to AutoPlay Menu Studio
available - Indigo Rose has set very high standards for others
to play catch up with.
A wide variety of support options including email, web, fax, phone,
knowledge base, FAQs and user forums are available. A 30 day trial
version can be downloaded from the Indigo Rose site.
Rated:  Five
Flowers
Company: Indigo Rose
Version: 3
Price: US$ 295
Homepage: www.indigorose.com/autoplay/index.html
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AtomPack Beta
Like Menu Facturer (the next program reviewed),
AtomPack is designed to execute any item from a list of items.
That does not mean that you cannot execute a few events from
an autorun
splash created using AtomPack.
You can make the interface that the users see look like almost
anything you want to by creating the look or "skin" with
AtomPack Skin Editor, a separate bundled application. You would
then use AtomPack Creator to select all the elements the user would
want to view and associate the skin you made earlier with this.
The initial selections to create a new project are wizard driven.
Unfortunately, AtomPack is a program which never crossed the beta
stage. That translates to no support or updates. Nevertheless,
the program is very stable and has been tested to run without problems
on a variety of systems. And, yes it's free!
Rated:  Three
Flowers
Company: AtomPack
Version: Beta 3
Price: Free
Homepage: www.thelegendgroup.com/atompack/
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StarterFile
StarterFile is a one-file application - a single executable called
starterf.exe has to be placed on your CD-ROM's root - instances
to the file are then inserted in your autorun.inf file. As expected
with such a minimalised concept, almost everything has to be done
manually - from editing the autorun.inf to actually creating the
tree structure of the CD-ROM.
In many ways, StarterFile is a one trick pony - it's just that
it's excellent in whatever it does - in fact, StarterFile does
not even create an autorun splash! You might ask that what is it
then doing within this list of autorun splash creators - read further...
The very concept of autorun.inf and autorun CDs, as developed
by Microsoft only allows EXE files to be executed - so, if you
want to run a HTML, PDF or even a TXT file off the CD through autorun,
you'll find that's not possible. Enter StarterFile - which allows
you to enter arguments like:
open=starterfile.exe abc.html
The example shown above will actually launch the HTML file in
the system's default browser. This concept seems even more attractive
when you consider the fact that half the programs mentioned on
this very page cannot run anything apart from EXE files - however
they can manage EXE files with arguments!
StarterFile thus earns its place as an excellent complement to
other autorun splash programs, although it is priced on the higher
side.
Rated:  Three
And A Half Flowers
Company: Trah
Version: 1
Price: UK 50 pounds
Homepage: www.autorun.co.uk
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