FlashCats Flash Catalyst Tips N' Tricks

Creating an Autorun CD from your Catalyst Swf

If you've created a presentation or demo in Catalyst that you'd like to start up automatically from a CD or flash drive, then this tutorial is for you.

What you'll need:

1. A Flash Catalyst project you'd like to autorun

Here's what you do:

1. Publish your Flash Catalyst project, and open the run-local folder
2. Open Main.swf with Adobe Flash Player (Right Click -> Open With -> Adobe Flash Player)
3. Under Flash Player's File menu, choose Create Projector. A projector is a native application wrapper for your swf, a .app on Mac or a .exe on Windows. This is what you'll autorun.
4. Create a file named AutoRun.inf with a program like Notepad, and add the lines
   [AutoRun]
   open=projector.exe
5. Replace projector.exe with the filename of your projector from Step 3.
6. Burn AutoRun.inf, your projector from Step 3, and the assets folder from run-local version of your published project to your CD, or place them on removable media like a flash drive.

You're done! As you may have noticed, the autorun feature will only work with PCs. You can read more about autorun in this article. You can still create a Mac projector and place it on your CD, but Mac OS X doesn't have the same autorun feature as PCs.