Hiding Windows

WARNING:

As with any operation that involves accessing the registry or modifying Windows boot settings, drivers, etc, it is entirely possible to render your system unbootable. All usual precautions apply: System Restore, the F8 key during boot and the original Windows XP setup disk are your friends. Backup any important files to a media that is 100% separate from your system. You are proceeding at your own risk.

Introduction

To add to the illusion that your home arcade machine is a 'real' arcade machine, it would be nice to be able to hide the familiar Windows PC look and feel. Nobody wants to see the Windows logo when your cabinet is turned on; its kind of like being caught with your pants down. There are several ways of achieving this, lets have a look at your options...

Replacing Your BIOS Logo

Some modern BIOS’s support changing the logo that is the very first thing displayed when your computer turns on. It should be noted that there’s not too much to gained from doing this as most computers are so fast the image is only momentarily flashed and your display device normally won’t have got up to operating specifications before the BIOS screen disappears. If yours can be changed, there will be an utility to do this on the motherboard manufacturer’s website.

There's other info to add to this, but darned if I can find it right now!

Replacing Your Boot Screen

The boot screen is the Windows XP logo on a black background with a little blue progress bar underneath it. Before making any changes, be sure to create a System Restore point before attempting these methods. While not a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card, it can save you from yourself. This way, in case something goes wrong, restarting your computer, pressing and holding F8 until the Operating System menu appears and selecting “Last Known Good Configuration” should get you back to your previous state in most cases.

You can modify your boot screen in these ways:

BootSkin

This product inserts a driver file into the XP startup sequence that displays an image instead of actually loading a driver.

Pros:

• It does not patch or access any operating system files.
• If something goes wrong, it is simple to fix.
• You can customize both the screen and the progress bar.

Cons:

• Relies on BIOS and driver manufacturers strictly obeying certain guidelines.
• If the system is incompatible, you'll likely get a "blue screen of death".

BootXP

This alters resources and some other bits in a file called “ntoskrnl.exe”.

Pros:

• You can customize both the screen and the progress bar.

Cons:

• If something goes wrong, you will need an original Windows XP CD to put it right and knowledge of how to use the recovery console.
• It accesses and patches a critical operating system file.
• You get really ugly and slow nag screens every time you want to change your boot screen if you don’t pay for it.

Slimm Boot-Logo / The Microsoft Way

There is an undocumented switch in Microsoft Windows XP’s operating system settings file. Slimm Boot-Logo simply flicks the switch.

• You can also set this switch manually. Go to My Computer >Properties >Advanced >Startup and Recovery >Settings. Select “Edit startup options file”. Add “ /bootlogo /noguiboot” to your default operating system (there must be a space between each switch) and add a 16-color 640 x 480 pixel BMP file called "boot.bmp” to your Windows directory.

Pros:

• Simple, safe, simply asks the operating system to use a custom boot screen.
• No illegal or unrecommended patching of any file.
• Least chance of anything going wrong (your changed settings can be checked before you reboot. After performing the change, go to My Computer >Properties >Advanced >Startup and Recovery >Settings. If you still have “Microsoft Windows XP” in the combo box at the top, everything should work fine next time you boot.

Cons:

• No progress bar on custom boot screen.
• Have to convert your image to 640 x 480 pixels and 16 colors yourself.
• If it goes wrong you will need an original Windows XP CD to put it right.

• If something goes wrong: You need to rebuild the “boot.ini” file using the instructions in this knowledge base article

Replacing Explorer With Your FE In XP

If you want to almost completely bypass Windows and all things Windows, you may want to set your front end as a shell. Note; to do this automatically during startup in XP your computer may be a part of a workgroup, but it can't be part of a domain.

Steps

• You must have at least 2 users with admin privileges
• Open the user that will be auto logged in to the account that will be running your front end as a shell. This user should have admin rights.
• Set XP to automate the login process.
  1. Click start >run >type

     control userpasswords2

  2. Deselect the Users must enter a username and password... checkbox.
  3. Click Apply
  4. Enter the user & pass you want to login with & click OK
  5. Click OK again
• Configure your front end... this is not a trial run, so make sure it's the way you want it. You can always get the explorer back, but it will take a minute or two to do so.
• Open regedit and find

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\IniFileMapping\system.ini\boot

• Find a string entry called Shell.
• Change the first 3 letters which read SYS to USR. so it reads USR:BLAH\BLAH\BLAH. This tells windows to ignore the system’s shell values and load up a shell value on a user by user basis. If you don’t do this it will never even look for the shell value in the current user key, meaning the next part won’t ever be seen.
• Now (still in regedit) open these registry folders as follows:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

• If you can't find Shell create a string entry and name it Shell.
• Set the string entry to the name and directory location of your front end, for example

  C:\arcade\mamewah.exe

  YOURS may be different, use YOUR OWN path to the exe!
• Log out as the auto-login user and log back in as another user with administrative rights. (You DID create 2 accounts with adminstrative priveledges as was suggested, right? )
• IF you want to limit the access of the auto log-in user set the auto-login user to a standard user

Should you ever care to go back to the way things were, after firing up your front end, simply hit ctrl alt del and run regedit again, and delete the shell entry you created. POOF! Everything’s back to “normal” again!

Hiding Explorer While Your FE Starts

You can achieve a similar affect as the above (although not as "complete", and may or may not be acceptable to you) with the following steps:

1. Put a shortcut to your FE's .exe file in “Startup” folder.
2. Hide all windows desktop icons. You will need to download and install the Microsoft PowerToy TweakUI and change the Desktop settings.
3. Set desktop to black or use a wallpaper image of your choice
4. Auto hide task bar.

Welcome/Startup/Shutdown/Background Color

• To hide the Welcome Screen (where you'd normally log in) you'll need to change from the default windows XP welcome screen to the other style by going to Control Panels >User Accounts >Change the way users logon or off. Deselect the “Use Welcome Screen” checkbox.

• To get rid of the startup and shutdown messages, go to Start >Run and type in regedit. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

If there’s a DisableStatusMessages dword there, change it to 1, otherwise add it and change it to 1.

• To change the login background color from blue to black (to better hide it), use regedit again and navigate to HKEY_USERS\DEFAULT\Control Panel\Colors\Background The 3-digit RGB color for black is 0 0 0.

The Hardware solution for Hiding BIOS & Windows Boot Screen

1. Add a (very cheap - doesn't even have to work) PCI video card (you need to already have an AGP video card) to PC

2. Set "Video Card" to "PCI" (instead of AGP) in BIOS set-up screen

3. Reboot PC

The BIOS messages (and Windows boot screen) are now output-ed only on the PCI card. As my monitor is still plugged into the AGP card, the screen stays completely blank until Windows starts (with MameWah as my shell). If I need to make any BIOS changes I'd need to plug the monitor into the PCI VGA output, but that will be an extremely rare occurrence.

I was expecting to need to disable the PCI card in Windows, but XP hasn't even noticed the addition of the card.

Result!

This is probably quite set-up dependant, but it worked a treat for me, and I would hope it will be useful info for others....