Booting OS/2 with an Animation

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi

A month ago I tried this Japanese software (from 1997) called ANIBOOT, since I did not believe it was possible to have an animation on the OS/2 boot. But I tried it and it worked. For what I tested it only works on Warp 4.0 (no newer) in Japanese language.

Here it is the video running it on a Virtual Machine: https://youtu.be/xxx6abgH-mY

Sadly, the author told me he left the source code at IBM when leaving.

Regards

[Martin Iturbide]

Also, I talked about this to two different guys at Warpstock and didn't know anything about it.

I'm posting this as a reminder to show them when I got the chance 

Regards

[Martin Iturbide]

It seems that he modified the kernel.

[Doug Bissett]

It seems that he modified the kernel.

That would be a good bet.

Why you would want an animation, is beyond me. All it does is slow down booting. Even Microsoft doesn't do silly things like that.

FWIW, if you really want some sort of animation. look at doing it with QSINIT. It could play a movie, and then boot OS/2. I don't know if there is a suitable player in QSINIT, but one could be written. QSINIT is a small operating system, and should be capable of doing it, even if it is just a series of static pictures.

[Valery Sedletski]

2Martin: Also, OS/4 supports color logos created as GIF pictures. Not sure if it supports animated GIF's, but everything is possible
Most probably, no, of course

[RickCHodgin]

Why you would want an animation, is beyond me. All it does is slow down booting. Even Microsoft doesn't do silly things like that.

Windows 7 has a boot up animation.  It plays in the foreground while Windows boots up in the background.  It was comprised of four window panes coalescing into a single window amid a light show.

Win 7 bootup animation

[Martin Iturbide]

Hi
I just found it interesting that on 1997 someone already hacked or binary changed the kernel to do something like this.

I personally like a "quiet boot" where you don't see any messages if the boot process is ok. It is like going from the "OS/2 square box", to the "Logo screen" and later to the "Desktop" without seeing any boot messages if you have no reported issues.

I think that an animated logo, not the way it is implemented as ANIBOOT, will be nice while the drivers are loading. I understand that ANIBOOT pauses your boot for the animation instead if running while the drivers are loading on the background.

Also, Windows 10 has the wait circle as boot animation, it is more formal that the stuff we had on the 90's, but it still an animation. On some Linux distros there was also a nice feature that you only see the boot logo, but if you pressed "Esc" you can switch to all the details of the stuff booting at that time.

Regards

[Wendy Krieger]

OS/2 2.1 used an animated boot, so it ought be possible.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello

Just to document this old thread. The OS/2 Warp 3 Beta 2 CD-ROM has a boot animation:
- https://youtu.be/k10yM0OCJeE

First, there is like little OS/2 logos and it switches to the big one
Second, after some loading the OS/2 circles disappear and appears in an animation.

Regards

[RTAN]

The start of the animation sequence (little OS/2 logos then the main centre logo) was also present in at least OS/2 2.1 wasn’t it? And maybe OS/2.0? I liked that, sadly even my ‘Retro PC’ gets through that initial part of the startup that i so rarely see it, or perhaps it’s my Dell TFT taking a couple of seconds to switch resolution so I miss it. A shame, I really like seeing those at the start!

I quite liked the animation ending as well, shame they removed it from the release version of Warp.

[Martin Iturbide]

Hello Richard.

The start of the animation sequence (little OS/2 logos then the main centre logo) was also present in at least OS/2 2.1 wasn’t it?

My first OS/2 was Warp 3, and I haven't played with the 2.x version enough. Maybe that is why I found it interesting, since I never have a boot animation in my OS/2. 

Regards

[RTAN]

I'm like you - my first experience of OS/2 was Warp 3 back in 1994 - a trial version was included on a magazine cover CD when I was at University. I had a 486SX25 with 8MB RAM and I remember waiting patiently for the drivers for my CD-ROM (connected via my SoundCard, not IDE) so that I could actually install it!

More recently, in revisiting retro PC's and legacy OS's I've been having some fun getting to know OS/2 2.1 quite a bit more, and then 2.0 and 1.3 to a much lesser extent.

I have of course also bought ArcaOS 5.1 but I haven't actually used it much of late. My "daily driver" is my Windows 10 workstation but I want to spend some time with ArcaOS and get to know it more as well.