works nicely from the floppy

[bootsplash] / README.md

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+Bootsplash
+----------
+Small bootable program that shows a splash effect every time you boot it up, and
+when you hit any key on the keyboard, it proceeds to load the actual system (or
+your regular boot loader) off the hard drive.
+
+
+Author: John Tsiombikas <nuclear@member.fsf.org>
+
+Not copyrighted, public domain software. Feel free to use it any way you like.
+If public domain is not legally recognized in your country, you may instead use
+it under the terms of the Creative Commons CC0 license.
+
+Future improvements (TODO list):
+
+  - Option to load active partition instead of MBR from the selected boot device
+    to make bootsplash itself installable on the MBR (as it is, it would just
+    infinitely load itself).
+  - Add BIOS parameter block and fake partition table, to make it more likely
+    to be loadable from a USB stick.
+  - Add timeout to boot automatically if no key is pressed for a certain amount
+    of time.
+
+Build
+-----
+To build bootsplash you need the netwide assembler (nasm). If you want to
+customize the image used by the effect, you'll also need a C compiler to build
+the RLE encoder under `rle`.
+
+The data files are not in the repo. You'll need to get them from one of the
+release archives.
+
+  - `nuclear.pgm`: 320x200 greyscale image used by the effect in binary Portable
+    GreyMap format.  This is fed into the `rle` encoder to produce `nuclear.rle`
+    which is `incbin`-ed into the bootsplash program.
+  - `fire.ppm`: 256x1 RGB image in binary Portable PixMap format. The header gets
+    stripped and the resulting `fire.pal` file is `incbin`-ed into the program.
+
+If you don't want to customize the effect, simply copy the final files
+(`nuclear.rle` and `fire.pal`) and type make.
+
+To install onto a floppy, just use `dd`.