Bootsplash

Small bootable program that shows a splash effect every time you boot it up, and when you hit any key on the keyboard, it proceeds to load the actual system (or your regular boot loader) off the hard drive. It also presents a menu of all available drives in the system, and can chain-load the boot sector of any one of them, by pressing the corresponding number key.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcIpD00TYNg

Author: John Tsiombikas nuclear@member.fsf.org

Not copyrighted, public domain software. Feel free to use it any way you like. If public domain is not legally recognized in your country, you may instead use it under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 license.

Future improvements (TODO list):

• Option to load active partition instead of MBR from the selected boot device to make bootsplash itself installable on the MBR (as it is, it would just infinitely load itself).
• Add timeout to boot automatically if no key is pressed for a certain amount of time.

Build

To build bootsplash you need the netwide assembler (nasm). If you want to customize the image used by the effect, you'll also need a C compiler to build the RLE encoder under rle.

The data files are not in the repo. You'll need to get them from one of the release archives.

• nuclear.pgm: 320x200 greyscale image used by the effect in binary Portable GreyMap format. This is fed into the rle encoder to produce nuclear.rle which is incbin-ed into the bootsplash program.
• fire.ppm: 256x1 RGB image in binary Portable PixMap format. The header gets stripped and the resulting fire.pal file is incbin-ed into the program.
• ui.png: boot menu UI graphics. It gets dumped as ui.img with pngdump and incbin-ed into the bootsplash program.

If you don't want to customize the effect, simply copy the final files (nuclear.rle, fire.pal, and ui.img) and type make.

To install onto a floppy or a USB stick, just use dd.