Most of our readers know what SCALA is. It is one of the most known multimedia applications for Amiga that was made in Norway. SCALA made presentations Amiga computers work at most shopping malls, airports, and cinemas showing ads.
So, is RNOSlides a SCALA killer? No! But it doesn’t need to be! But maybe in the future?
Slides on AGA or RTG Amigas with RNOSlides
My test machine is my Amiga 1200 68060 100MHz with HDMI RTG out at 1280x720x32. I am using a Warp1260 accelerator card with 256MB RAM. And I have to say that I am impressed!
The GUI is easy to understand. Adding the slides is working fast and you can add text to the slides! The only downside for now that I’ve found is that there’s no possibility to copy and paste slides or text. But this might be available in the future? I hope!
Bigger text box area in the future?
But setting how long each slide should be on is easy. And the program itself explains things to you. However, a bigger writing text area would be great. In AmiFox you can pop up a bigger text box if you want to.. and I think it would be a nice feature here too.
Also, it would be a nice feature if there was a preview function where you could set where the text should be. Now it works for simple text, but it is a bit messy as seen in the image above. The “Texts” part in Settings window should also be moved to the main window.
Also, a nice thumbnail of the slide that you are editing would be nice like in AmiTube, shown on the
But if you want to have text at certain spots of the picture. It is not so easy. But it is not impossible. Also, a way of drawing vector arrows, circles, and boxes like in SCALA would be neat to have.
Another thing is that in the 68k version, RNOSlides should have support for CDXL video format. Saving to AVI or MPEG is possible. But you really need a 68060 to play them. That’s why the 68k version should have a CDXL option in my view.
I know that I am a bit picky here because I see so much potential in RNOSlides. And maybe the developer reads this?
High-end Amiga is Recommended
For now, RNOSlides deliver speed and simplicity. But RNOSlides could become SCALA for RTG. At least AmigaOS 3.0, 68020, and around 16 MB RAM, but in reality a high-end Amiga or emulation setup is recommended.
Including Classic, RNOSlides are also available for MorphOS, AROS, AmigaOS4, and even WarpOS.
For now, the total score is 4/10. But I see big potential in this application.
You need these to make RNOSlides run
– MUI 3.8 or later (http://aminet.net/package/util/libs/mui38usr)
– codesets.library (http://aminet.net/search?query=codesets)
– guigfx.library (http://aminet.net/package/dev/misc/guigfxlib)
– render.library (http://aminet.net/search?query=renderlib) (v32 is probably the best for <040 CPUs)
– AHI (http://aminet.net/search?query=ahiusr)
