China DOS Union

The boot.ini menu can use ANSI control codes to display colors, for example the boot.ini below:

timeout=30

default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS



multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="




Screenshot of the effect when running it:



[ Last edited by fujianabc on 2006-5-25 at 18:42 ]

Oh—! I didn't expect NTLDR to support ANSI escape sequences too

I'll try it.

Re fujianabc:

An exciting discovery!

It has already been tested and confirmed that NTLDR not only supports ANSI color control escape sequences, but also other ANSI control sequences, including clear screen, cursor positioning, shifting, reset, keyboard redefinition, display mode settings, etc.

In other words, based on this we can design a completely new boot.ini menu. As long as we pay attention to some details, a fully customized interface can be achieved. Aside from the drawback that background images cannot be used, other menu styles similar to EasyBoot can also be designed.

The OP is awesome. Is it really possible? I'll give it a try...

Hehe, fun.

It would be nice if the text prompts outside the menu could be colored too.

Now the forum is going to have another whole series of fun stuff!
Hope someone uses ntldr to make an MS-DOS 9, haha

Success! Even after I deleted the Chinese font Bootfont.bin file, it still displayed a colorful menu. It really is NTLDR that can handle ANSI color control escape sequences.

I suggest making this thread featured.

Re Michael:

“It would be nice if the text prompts outside the menu could be colored too.”

That's the detail I mentioned. Some prompt text below the menu items is displayed only after the menu items are shown. So if  is used in a menu item to clear the screen, that prompt text will still appear below this menu item, but if you move the cursor up or down at that point, the menu item information gets rewritten, the screen is cleared again, and the prompt text will no longer appear.

I tried it, and it really is pretty good. But I found that if a line uses ANSI-controlled color, when the cursor moves to that line the highlight bar disappears. Is there any way to solve that?

Originally posted by Wengier at 2006-5-26 11:34 AM:
试了一下，确实不错。不过我发现如果某行采用了ANSI控制颜色的话，当光标移到这行时光标条会消失，不知有没有办法解决？

If you don't use highlight 

If the prompt text is inside ntldr, it should be changeable, right? Not sure whether it's possible to manually add some ANSI escape sequences into it.
Probably impossible. Hehe.

Hehe, no wonder. Highlighted text conflicts with the highlight bar. But if you don't use highlight colors, it doesn't look as good.

Originally posted by Michael at 2006-5-25 18:31:
如果选单以外的文字提示也可以是彩色的就好了。

Eh—you're asking too much