Basically what Randomizer does is change your StartupScreen at boot time. It will display the name of the file it chooses in the top left corner unless you hold down the Option key to turn the display off (if it is off then the Option key will turn it back on).
It looks in the folder Screens in your System Folder and copies one of the files from there, selected at random, into the file StartupScreen. If either the file or the folder is not present, it does nothing.
Randomizer can do more, although that is not enabled to start with. You need to make some changes with ResEdit if you want it to do more. In Randomizer is a STR# resource #2001. By adding file and folder names, you can make Randomizer do this copying thing for any number of files. All of the files and folders MUST be in the System Folder. Randomizer can also do special things when copying several files like this. For example, in the old days, there was an INIT that played sounds at boot time and another that made a sound file into your beep. Both of these things are done differently now, so I don╒t use them anymore, but Randomizer still knows how to change them all together. For example, if you add the strings StartupSound and Sounds to the STR# then Randomizer will pick a screen and then try to pick a sound by the same name, allowing synchronization of the picture and sound. If you end both of the file╒s names with the .ONLY extension then it will only use them together. If you don╒t use .ONLY then it can use them seperately too. I used to have a picture of the Batmobile named Batman.only in the Screens folder and a sound of Batman and Robin doing the ╥Atomic batteries to power╙ thing in the Sounds folder named Batman.only also. They would only appear together. If they were named only Batman then they could appear with other pictures or sounds.
Enough of the could be╒s though. I only use Randomizer to change my color startupscreens now. I use the commercial Control Panel program ColorDesk to display the screens. I cannot include it here. It is available from Microseeds Publishing, wherever they may be. I also use my Control Panel device SwitchBeep to randomly choose a new beep at startup. Whereas Randomizer works with files, SwitchBeep works with snd resources. Check it out.
Randomizer works with SoundMaster, sort of. SoundMaster isn╒t smart enough to look at the file sizes when it starts up. It wants to know how big the files are before it starts. You can fool it though by copying your largest sound into the file StartupSound (or whatever you named it) and choosing this file with SoundMaster. This way SoundMaster will always allocate enough memory for your sound and Radomizer will always copy a smaller file into its place. It ain╒t pretty but it works. Needless to say, I don╒t guarentee anything with regards to this procedure.
More techie stuff:
There is a PNT resource that tells where to put the top left corner of the window that displays the new file name. There is a BOOL resource that tells whether to display the window. The Option key toggles this resource╒s value. Both resources have TMPLs so you can edit them in ResEdit.
Randomizer also adds a STR resource to the copied file which contains the name of the file it copied from the folder. It does this so that it can avoid copying the same file the next time. This guarentees that the file will change. You can mangle or remove this if you are so inclined.
Randomizer is free, but I am an avid skier and lift tickets in California are reaching $40 so send money if you can. Feel free to ask questions and make suggestions.
