Hiding Windows 7 for cabinet?

[DBrown67]

Hi guys 

I'm not completely new to building Mame projects and cabinets, but one issue has me a little stumped right now. I have a cabinet running boggo standard Hyperspin with Mame. No other emulators, jut Mame.

It's running on Windows 7 Home. Now I'm not fussed about totally getting rid of Windows being present. The Windows splash screen and loading jingle don't bother me.

But once Hyperspin is up and running then I don't want to to see any trace of Windows till I exit Hyperpsin and the machine shuts down.

And herein lies my problem. My cabinet is a dedicated vertical classics machine. I have Hyperspin set to start in a window across the centre in a 760 x 568 resolution on a CRT monitor. (Can't remember if that's the exact res but it looks OK for me)

I have the desktop icons hidden behind the Hyperspin menu so you don't ever see them. Mame games run full screen vertical of course. But I have the damn taskbar at the bottom visible. And even if I right click taskbar and use the "hide" function it doesn't fully hide it. It leaves a white line running across the bottom of the monitor which is arguably even more irritating than seeing the full taskbar!

I tried the use a shell application to run Hyperspin and that seemed to work nicely. But it also stopped my Ultimarc 4/8 way joystick switching with F4 and F8. JoyTray has to start in Windows and shelling Hyperspin screws that up.

There needs to be a way of starting both Hyperspin and JoyTray together while at the same time hiding that damned Windows taskbar fully. I mean... why make a feature to hide the taskbar that doesn't actually hide it properly?

[dougan78]

Kill explorer.exe before you launch hyperspin

[phantomthrill]

Did you gointo HyperHQ click on the screen tab, and then click enabled under FullScreen?

[Bungles]

STEP 1. Open Registry Editor. Type regedit in RUN or Start Menu search box and press Enter.

STEP 2. Now you'll need to tell Windows which EXE file should it use as default Windows shell or user interface. There are 2 ways to do it:

• You can set your customized shell for currently logged in user only (Step 3)
• Or set the customized shell for whole system including all user accounts (Step 4)

STEP 3.a. If you want to set the customized shell to currently logged in user only which is also recommended, go to following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies

3.b. Under "Policies" key look for another key named "System". If its not present, create it manually.

3.c. Now select "System" key and in right-side pane, create a new String value Shell and set its value to the full path of your desired program. For example, if you modified Explorer.exe file and saved it somewhere else such as E:\MyExplorer.exe, then set value to E:\MyExplorer.exe.
Note: If you want to set a 3rd party program as default shell like Hyperspin, set the value to the full path of that program's EXE file.

3.d. That's it. Once you finish the steps, restart your system and you'll see your desired program once you log into Windows.

=== === === === === === === === ===

STEP 4.a. If you want to set customized shell for whole system including all user accounts, go to following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

4.b. In right-side pane, look for String value Shell. Its value would be set to explorer.exe. Double-click on it and change its value to your customized Explorer.exe path or to desired 3rd party shell program's full path as mentioned in step 4.c.

4.c. Restart your system and get ready to boot into your desired shell program.

NOTE: If you face problems after changing the shell or you want to restore default user interface, don't worry. Press Ctrl+Shft+Esc keys together to launch Task Manager. Click on File -> New Task option and type regedit and press Enter. It'll open Registry Editor. Now you can safely remove Shell string value created in step 3.b to restore default Explorer.exe file as Windows shell. Or if you modified value of Shell string using step 4.b, restore its value to explorer.exe and restart your system.

 

PS: This will work for Windows versions including but not limited to Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, 8.1 and Windows 10.

 

You can also load HyperHQ and set Hyperspin to load your JoyTray as part of its startup routine.

Simply add the JoyTray .exe in to the Startup Program (Select the folder to the left and select your .exe file), add any additional parameters if it needs them and set the preferred state be it normal, minimized, Hidden etc.