Simple Boot Logo

[Queue]

My desktop background color is black so the default Win98SE startup logo was blindingly bright compared to the pre-logo boot period and the Windows desktop. I wanted something simple, so initially I had a black screen with just a Windows XP style blue loading bar. This was nice, but slightly too minimalist, and smacked of Vista. There was another problem: before reaching the desktop, the logo would disappear and I'd be staring at a black screen with a blinking text cursor in the upper left (my autoexec.bat has a CLS in it).

I decided to build an ASCII Art logo in autoexec.bat using ECHO lines so there'd be some sort of picture between the graphical logo and my desktop.

I was happy with the results and wound up cloning the text-mode logo to the animated graphical logo and here's the result:

As you can see, they match almost perfectly; here's a ZIP containing the animated logo (LOGO.SYS) and a BAT file. Copy the contents of the BAT file to the end of your autoexec.bat file (the important part is the CLS and two ECHO lines).

Download ZIP File

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[starcraftmaster]

lol good but some people like eye candy more

so mabye make a nice xp looking one for win me and 98

[Queue]

Erm, I think you missed the point: I shared this for the hell of it, I will never change my boot logo again. There are many very nice fancy boot logos out there already: people have been making them since like 1995. It was a nice XP-style boot logo that actually inspired me to mess with my boot logo in the first place (aside from the blinding brightness of the default 98SE boot logo).

What I thought I provided that was unique was an ANSI Art Windows logo (the two ECHO lines in the batch file). The one seen during the fabled MinWin presentation was pathetic.

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[jaclaz]

What about EKKO.COM?

http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/Tips.html#Tip011

This way you can have a coloured ASCII Art logo....

jaclaz

[Queue]

Originally I was writing my own COM program to display the logo rather than using ECHO, but it seemed (I didn't do proper benchmarking) that running a simple COM file was slower than using ECHO. Keep in mind autoexec.bat is being parsed anyway when considering processing cost; I am assuming that CLS and ECHO are both in-built command.com commands and not external COM files.

It takes two ECHO lines the way I did it because I hit ECHO's max character limit trying to cram it all on one line. =/

I may take another stab at it at some point down the line, as the only reason the animated logo isn't in color is because the text-mode version isn't. I had played around with some versions based on letters, numbers and symbols or using a geater variety of ANSI/ASCII symbols, but wound up liking the simplicity and continuity of the blocks. The animated logo takes up 12 colors excluding the animated bar (which uses 16 palette entries). 1 color is black and 7 are the animated bar's outline; the Windows logo is 4 shades of grey.

Here's how closely I actually matched the Windows 98 logo:

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[jaclaz]

Yep, I really like the idea of the ASCII art.

Simple and effective.

It is assumed that you already tried the DOS-LOGO.SYS:

http://logosys.logotypes.se/

and for any reason it did not work for you/you didn't like it, right?

For the record, DOS-LOGO.SYS is a device driver that "reloads" the graphical logo from config.sys, thus "hiding" the text that would be otherwise seen on screen.

jaclaz

[Queue]

Yeah, I referenced that site quite a bit when making the animated logo; did a fair bit of experimenting with the second byte related to the palette cycling, but without getting worthwhile results (lots of seizure-y color flickering though). The program I used to adjust the color palette entries produced a BMP that wasn't viable as a boot logo (offset of the bitmap data wasn't proper) so had to shift some things around using a HEX Editor and I used that site as a reference. Again, I wanted to avoid extra processing overhead, even if ridiculously minimal, so using a SYS file was about as appealing as using a COM file.

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[Drugwash]

This reminds me the WLL update project has stalled for a long time, having my fingers stuck in too many other pies. Maybe you could chime in with a few ideas, time allowing.

Please note that most of the links expired (those at uploaded.to) but I still have the complete package somewhere around, if you wanna look at the (ugly ) code.

I wish PassingBy would get some spare time too, coz he really knows what he's doing.

Edited March 12, 2009 by Drugwash