A Reminder About AutoRun
Before covering my next game project, I again wanted to remind you that AutoRun is basically a dead concept. It was the source of no end of security issues: We literally spread a malware worm through my entire high school by taking an infected flash drive, plugging it into every PC we could find, waiting 10 seconds (while nothing visibly happened on the PC screen) and moving onto the next one back in the day. It was also an easy vector for bloatware or pranks, and in a different form is still used for bloatware, with ASUS motherboards being able to auto-install Armoury-Crate directly from the motherboard and LG monitors now downloading McAfee through Windows update.
AutoRun is disabled by default on modern Windows and is effectively non-existent on Mac and Windows. You also won’t find any software to make AutoRun menus for Mac or Linux, since the resulting product can’t run there.
You also don’t need fancy software to configure a disc’s AutoRun options. All you need is a file called “autorun.inf” in the root data folder being burned to the CD. This can control the label of the CD, the icon shown, and options to run.
A basic example of this would be:
[autorun]
open=setup.exe
icon=icon.ico
label=My Custom CD
Or you could have a more advanced one with programs, music, websites, etc.:
[autorun]
open=setup1.exe
shellexecute=setup2.exe
icon=assets\icon.ico
label=Multi-Option Demo Disc
[content]
Music=audio\track1.mp3
Website=https://www.example.com
Documents=docs\manual.pdf
Just right-click and mount your ISO to test the image before burning to make sure you didn’t make a mistake and it’s pretty easy!