How to create a MAX Student CD-ROM for delivery on MS-Windows

 

You can create CD-ROMs containing your own completed MAX lessons for non-commercial distribution.  This means you may not charge any money for the CD-ROMs that contain our software except to cover the cost of duplication.  Please see http://cali.arizona.edu for information regarding commercial use.  Do not put any copyrighted material on the CD-ROMs.

 

These instructions will walk you through the process of creating an AutoPlay CD-ROM containing your MAX lessons that will work on Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP.  The Critical Languages CD-ROMs (http://clp.arizona.edu/cls) were created with a version of this same system.

 

AutoPlay (sometimes called AutoStart or AutoRun) is a widely used feature of MS-Windows that makes a CD-ROM automatically start when it is placed into the CD-ROM drive.  When the CD-ROM starts, it first checks to see if the necessary supporting MAX files (fonts and executable files) are installed on the computer.  If MAX has not been installed before, the installation process begins.  If an older version of MAX was installed on the computer, the old files are updated.  Then, MAX starts and opens welcome.max.

 

Before putting your completed lessons on CD-ROM, please make sure that there are not any footnote links in your lessons that contain absolute pathnames such as C:\hello\hello.max.  Absolute pathnames are bad because when you put your lessons on the CD-ROM, it will be given a different drive letter such as D:, so the links will be broken.  To avoid this, use relative pathnames in your links.  Please see the MaxAuthor manual section on Footnote Segments for more information.  You should also test all of your links in your lessons to see if audio and graphic files exist.  To do this in MaxAuthor, open up a MAX file that links to all the lessons you are going to put on the CD-ROM (such as a 'table of contents').  Then select View…Footnote Links, see the manual topic.

 

First, we want to make sure you can make a basic, generic MAX CD-ROM just using our included test lesson.  Here are the step by step instructions:

 

  1. Click on Start…Programs…Accessories…Windows Explorer.
  2. Create a folder somewhere on your computer that will become the root folder of your CD-ROM.  For example, let's call this folder mycdrom.
  3. Download the zip file http://cali.arizona.edu/docs/genmaxcd/genmaxcd1.zip (5 MB) and unzip it to your mycdrom folder.
  4. Start up your CD-ROM creation program (such as EASY CD-CREATOR, etc.), and select all files in the mycdrom folder (and all of its subfolders).  Don't select the mycdrom folder itself, just the items in mycdrom.   Then burn the CD-ROM and look at what is on it.  If you did it right, you will have the file 'autorun.inf' in the root folder. 



  5. Now, eject the CD-ROM and then re-insert it.  If you already have UACALI software installed, the sample lesson should start.  If you didn't already have UACALI software installed, the Installer should lead you through the installation process.  If you already had UACALI software installed but you want to see what the install process would look like to a new user, you can uninstall (Start…Settings…Control Panel…Add/Remove Software…MAX) any UACALI software first so you can see how the CDROM does the full install.

 

Now that you have successfully created a generic MAX CD-ROM, you are ready to create a CD-ROM with your own lessons:

 

1.      Copy the folder containing your MAX lessons to the mycdrom folder.

2.      With MaxAuthor, edit the MAX file in the mycdrom folder called welcome.max.  This is the file that MAX opens up first when the AutoPlay starts.  This file should link (footnote) to your lessons.  Again, make sure that you only use relative footnote links.  Note that the footnote link on welcome.max points to myfirst/myfirst.max which is a relative link that tells MAX to "open up the MAX file myfirst.max in the directory myfirst relative to the directory where the file welcome.max is located".

3.      Now, burn another CD-ROM as described above.

4.      Test your CD-ROM thoroughly on several computers running different Windows operating systems, especially computers that have not had any UACALI software installed on them before.  Also test Uninstalling.

Troubleshooting

If you put the CD-ROM in the computer and it doesn't automatically start

Make sure that the file autorun.inf is located in the root folder of the CD-ROM that you created.  If it is not there, you probably selected the wrong files with your CD-ROM creation program (see above).

 

The computer may have the AutoPlay feature turned off.  On WindowsXP you can change this by opening MyComputer and under Devices with Removable Storage, right-click the CD-ROM device and then click Properties where you can change the AutoPlay settings.  Even if this setting is OK, some computers will refuse to start some AutoPlay CD-ROMs.  To manually start the CD-ROM, you can right click on the CD-ROM drive in Windows Explorer and select AutoPlay. 

Technical Details

How AutoPlay works

When a CD-ROM is placed into a Windows computer, it first looks for a file called autorun.inf.  If this file is present, it is supposed to contain the name of a program to run, in our case a program called setstub.exe.  This program checks to see if the current version of MAX is installed and if not, starts the installation program SETUP.EXE.  SETUP.EXE was created with the program InstallShield (www.installshield.com).

 

What files are installed

The installation program installs executable files (e.g. wmax.exe), font files (into the Windows font folder), keyboard mapping files (e.g. spn.key), and other configuration files.  These files are all removed when an end-user does an Uninstall.