Splasher and Splash Editor v2.70

Splasher is a program that lets you easily add a graphic and music 'SPLASH'
screen to a program when it starts up.


PROGRAMMER STUFF:

Version 2.4 adds the ability to play music with a splash screen.  But I couldn't
get it to work correctly as an initial segment.The program that plays the music
must be loaded from disk.  It would load and play the music, but when it left the
initial segment the program would crash.  Maybe the loader doesn't like you
loading something in the middle of it loading something.  So the segment needs to
be linked as a dynamic segment.  The code must be called by JSL STARTSPLASH. 
This can be done as the very first thing in your code.  See the sample Merlin 16+
source code for details.

With version 2.6 you can now use different resource IDs.  You can have several
splash screens in one program.  Although the demo is written in Merlin 16+, the
important things to remember is SplashM.L is to be linked as a dynamic segment to
be called by 'StartSplash'.  And it looks for the variable labeled 'resourceID'
to hold the resource number it will use.


USER STUFF:

Any program that uses Splasher to add graphics and/or music to the start up of a
program can have that graphic edited by Splash Editor.  With Splash Editor you
can edit the present graphic, create your own graphic, or use any other graphic
image that you have.  Splash Editor will load PIC and PNT files.  You can use
Splash Editor to choose to play the accompanying music or not.  You can choose
any other music to play.

The splash graphic and the information to play the music are saved as resources
to the program that splashes the image on the screen.  For instance Splasher Demo
is a program that just splashes an image on the screen when start up.  You would
use Splash Editor to OPEN SPLASHER.DEMO.  What you would actually be loading is
the graphic image resource from this program.  When you are through manipulating
this image you would save it back as SPLASHER.DEMO. You wouldn't be overwriting
the program, just saving the graphic image to it. You SHOULD get the replace this
file message.  It is only replacing the graphic resource.

How the program looks for music to play. It first looks in the same directory as
the program.  Then it looks in a subdirectory of named MUSIC.  If it can't find
it in those two places it then looks in the full pathname of the file. It does
this all invisibly of course.  If it can't find the music it just doesn't play it
but continues on.  What this means is that you can but the music and its
accompanying files in the same directory as the program, in a subdirectory of the
program named music or you can put it with all your other music files.   If you
do the latter you need to use Splash Editor to rechoose the music from the
directory that it is in.

REMEMBER don't lock the program or the graphic and music won't play.

For more information read the READ.ME and Manual files.


Clay