Monday 15 February 2016

grub4dos with animated bitmaps

Yaya has added support for animated bitmaps to the latest version of grub4dos 0.4.6a.

It allows you to display a sequence of bitmaps (e.g. pic01.bmp, pic02.bmp, etc.)


Animated transparent bitmap is displayed at the same time as the menu!



The new splashimage commands are:
splashimage --animated = [type] = [delay] = [sequence_num] = [offset_x] = [offset_y] = [name]

In the grub4dos console, type: help splashimage to see the complete syntax, as it may change in later versions of grub4dos,

Unfortunately, the cycle feature does not work if the grub4dos hotkey utility is used, so we cannot have it on E2B menus (unless the hotkey utility is removed). The other parameters are:

Reminder: Please hexadecimal format. Otherwise error-prone.
delay [delay]: delay sequence between images. The unit is ticking, that is 1 / 18.2 seconds.
The number of sequences [sequence_num]: Total number of image sequences (counted starting from 1).
Offset [offset_x], [offset_y]: the image shift in pixels.
Name [name]: image name, may include a path. Naming: xxxxx-01.xxx; xxxxx-02.xxx; ...; xxxxx-'sequence_num'.xxx.
You can add a test menu to your E2B USB drive. Download the AnimationTest.7z file on the 'Other files' are of the Alternate Download Areas for E2B. Extract the contents directly onto the root of your E2B USB drive.

This overwrites the \grldr grub4dos boot file and also adds some new folders into the \_ISO\docs and \_ISO\MAINMENU folders.

The other demo animations are:
Fractal

Solar

I will add support for animated bitmaps to E2B once the bugs have been ironed out.
I have not tested with jpg files and am not sure if they are supported...

The drawbacks at the moment are:
1. splashimage --animated must be run after a normal splashimage command (if run before then the normal splashimage command will stop animation).
2. For cycle mode, hotkey must not be run or must be uninstalled by using hotkey -u
3. For cycle mode, must use debug off or will see loading splashimage... messages
4. In cycle mode, continuously loads files from drive


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