How to launch a program from Director?

Question

Hi, I'm new to Director.
I want the user of my Director movie to click on a button
that launches Adobe Acrobat and a help file (external to the
Director movie).
How do I do this?

Answer 1

I have a similar question... can Director be used to launch a
program? I understand that you can tell it to open a file, in which
case the default application is automatically launched, but can you
give it a specific command line to execute?
I have SCALA MM200, and it can execute command lines from
within Windows, but as I recall it wasn't a very seamless
transition between the presentation and the launched program. I
hesitate to keep using MM200, since it was designed for Win 98/NT,
but rather than buy new software it might be best to stick with
what I've got if it still works under XP.
Seems to me a lot of current "multimedia" software is great
for animations and presentations, but there's little consideration
for creating a true GUI with it that will do stuff outside of the
presentation itself. I suppose I should go with VisualBasic or
something like that, but my programming days are 20 years behind
me, and there's still the issue of buying new software (unless VB
is free, which I doubt).
I plan to try MM200 under XP, but if it doesn't work, or
doesn't perform quite as I'd like it to, it would help to know that
Director could work. However, if there's no way to execute a
specific command line, it probably isn't the right choice for me.
A quick summary of my planned application is to present a
menu of choices to the user, and then execute certain programs
depending on the choice. The presentation will probably hide in the
background while these programs run, so another consideration is
avoiding any conflicts. The programs are video game emulators, and
certain options are set in the command line, so simply telling
Director to open a game file may not work, even if the emulator is
set as the default application to open that file. I'll still need
to pass certain command line switches to the app, and I'm not sure
I can do that in Director.
Thanks in advance for any help! :) (I never visit the forum,
so it's best to e-mail me at [email protected])