Classic Shell: Forum

Animated dragon start button.

Here is just the animated dragon, which can be used as a start button.
Was kind of hoping someone else would learn, and do it before me posting it. I waited for awhile.
It does not have any flames, as that really would take a lot of time resizing/syncing
each frame. There are 56 frames.

Since the good folks at Stardock already did all the hard work,
I just used Pixel Former, to scale it down to half size.
Added a one pixel height to allow for the important pixel information line.
Constantly checked the instructions http://www.classicshell.net/tutorials/b ... orial.html
and played with the color pixel numbers, until happy with the result.
Saved as .png file.

Due to the wings flapping twice as high as taskbar,
I have mine on default button size, and "Aligned to corner of screen" checked.



I have a strange sense of humour.
I'm briefly hovering the curser over dragon a couple times, until leaving in place.
Dragon looks like its A...A...ACHOO..ing.

I Didn't do it, because It wasn't asked for . Also theres quite a few Gifs Id rather see as a start button. If I were so inclined (but I don't plan on making any until the button can be fully animated, if that ever happens)

You and the rest of the team at Classic Shell know it all, already.
It was more for anyone else to try their hand at it.
Even though there is no looping, it's still pretty cool how animation works.

Would it be worth it, if enough people asked for it,
to have a mini tutorial, on how to convert a Gif to animated start button?
Gifs seem popular these days.

Well probably not; Its not to hard to rip flat images from a gif, and the provided documentation covers everything else , so I don't see it helping much (even if there were a 'community' in need of it)

Juniper7 - I don't know if you'll see this but I had to join to say THANK YOU !!

I'm using the Dragon as my start button on Windows 10 and I LOVE IT! I looked up the Stardock Dragon theme video to check it out.. though very cool especially with the flames, they didn't use the dragon as a start button, but just as a decoration at the top of the start menu. I think what you did with the dragon is way cooler than stardocks use for it. Heck, the start button for that theme is simply a cheesy looking eye.

Here's a link to that video so other folks can see the original dragon. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MiwLq8P88E

I'd Love to hear the dragon roar.. I wonder if there is a way to assign a wave file to the opening of the start button. Hmm..

Ya know, though I searched high and low, I cannot find anymore animated buttons anywhere to use with Classic Shell.. which is odd to me because I know there was a program made for windows 7 that allowed you to make animated start buttons. I haven't tried it though. It works by converting animated gifs to start buttons.

Windows 7 start button animator
http://www.door2windows.com/windows-7-s ... windows-7/

You can assign a sound to the opening of the main menu. Look at the Sounds tab in the settings.

Hi DivergentDroid.


There is a non animated replica of that menu in the skins section somewhere.

I checked back on my xp drive that has the molten dragon menu.
Didn't see any audio files for it. You would have to make your own.

I did try out what Ivo said about setting up a menu start up sound.
It works. I just used some old wave music opening file. It's not a dragon sound.
Maybe they only squeak like a mouse.
Whatever a roar would sound like, after the fifth time the menu opens, a roar might be too much.
Sorry, I'm showing my age. OK, how about a dragon playing an electrified distorted power cord? Now I'm really showing my age.

The eye button wasn't that bad to look at. I decided not to convert, as it's all horizontal frames.

I tried that "Windows 7 Start Button Animator" on Windows 7 without CSM. Kept getting error window.
Ran as admin, got the tray working and the little guy animated at the desk.
After that, just got more error windows.
Gave up on it.

I tried it with my own wav file also. It does work BUT, you see the animation before you hear the sound.. I'm telling the software to point the sound to "Main Menu" under Sound settings.

What we'd really need for this is to have sound on mouseover so the sound plays as soon as you hover over the Dragon, the same time the animation plays.

I cannot seem to find a way to do this in Windows even with third party apps. I know it can be done in Java but don't know how to make java work with windows.

I can make my own html code website with all kinds of buttons and triggers and display that as a desktop in windows 10 using the software called WallPaperWebPage - http://www.softpedia.com/get/Desktop-En ... Page.shtml but this is as close as I can get to the start button. I was hoping there would be something.. java or activeX or something that can solve this but I haven't found it yet.. I'll keep looking.

P.S. I'm not worried about your age.. I'm a 48 year old heavy metal head banger child of the 80's myself LOL Your idea of an electric guitar riff sounds awesome. I had a heck of a time trying to find a free dragon roar that was 2 seconds or under.

The hover audio, is a good feature request, that you can ask Ivo for.

There's a ton of phone rings out there. Must be a dragons roar?

Yeah, captured a few from different sites. Shortening the beginning and end dead space is easy with Audacity.
They all sound about the same, a dog,
or a cat that's been tempo, or pitch shifted downwards.
Would really need to be synched to be effective.

Then it brings up, how would the sound end,
for the different way a user clicks on start menu, abruptly, or fade away?