I have performed a search with keyword "Autorun.inf" in the forum and have not quite found an answer to the question I am posting here today.

"COR Entertainment" has developed three "free" very high quality games and their titles are; "Battle for Earth" at 136mb, "Alien Arena" at 127mb and "Martian Chronicles" at 127mb. They are downloaded individually in one complete "Installshield" package. "Alien Arena" has a 58mb update that is used to correct some issues with playing online and, I think, some other performance wrinkles. I am familiar with writing an autorun.inf file to have these automatically start to install when the cd I burnt them to is inserted into the drive. Without the use of an "Install Menu", is there some way that I can write an autorun for "Alien Arena" so that the update file will automatically install after I install the main game? By looking at other autoruns I see commands such as, "shell", "run" etc. I also see that the [;] is used. All I want to do is to automatically run the update after the main game has been installed. Can this be done with a single autorun file?

Thank you for your time and for any responses I may receive in reference to this.

If nothing else, write a small loader program that first runs the installer and then the update. Then call this program from the autorun.inf file instead.

Without asking out-of-term, could you advise me as to what small loader program I can use?

Thank you

I don't know of any such ready-made programs off the top of my head, that's why I said you should write one yourself. (that does not mean they don't exist though, on the contrary I'm quite sure they do) It should be quite simple anyway, a few API calls and that's all.

what does this question have to do with "Reverse Software Engineering help & support"? (the parent forum)

Yeah, yeah, moved to off-topic then.

The parent forum of off-topic is still "Reverse Software Engineering help & support"

Well Mr. Grumpy.... it has to do with "reversing" and modifying an "autorun file" to do the things Mac53 wants it to do. If you don't like the topic, how about you just don't post in it.

How about you leave the administrative decisions to the administration. Of course I can soften my critical comments by ending my post with a simlie.

Regards,

Code like dark woods.

What, JMI can end on a simile but I can't?

Of course you can.

Regards,

Such a program would basically consist of like 4 lines (quick and dirty):
CreateProcess for the first program, using the returned handle for WaitForSingleObject and then da capo for the second program.
You may have to check for child processes doing the real work, though. Completely depends on the installer being used. There are like gazillions of hobby programmers out there who can write up something, just in case your skills are completely located in a different field

I think all of you are assuming that Mac has programming skills, If I assume that he doesn't, I think he is looking to modify the autorun file, much like making a batch file to install the app and then run the update - quick, dirty, and simple (non-elegant), am I correct Mac?

SiGiNT

FINALLY...

Thank.....You......

The problem with that is that the autorun.inf parser uses CreateProcess() to launch the specified file. Therefore, non-executable content is not usable directly. For a batch file, it is easy though: launch a temporary copy of cmd.exe (or command.com, depends on your target system, use the %comspec% environment variable) to run your batch file. This will need some testing
Inside the batch file, run your applications using the start command with the /wait parameter (this will delay the batch file execution until the started process has terminated).
If these hints are not enough, you are strongly recommended to use your head for more than just a hat holder
Abundant documentation about writing batch files is available all over the net, just learn how to operate google properly

And while we're on the topic:

http://cwashington.netreach.net/

Handy site, especially when you're in a plagiarising kind of mood.