Test reports

4. Software test: Multimedia boot program Rainboot v2.90 (by Malte Mende)

»I think everybody knows the situation: You boot your Amiga and then you sit in front of a boring black screen. Commodore should have designed a more interesting boot screen...

After trying and failing create a picture viewer for booting, I thought: Why program it yourself when there is shareware? So I got Rainboot 2 from Aminet.

The installation was quite easy, even though I had to install it manually because it requires NewInstaller.

Furthermore you need OS 2.x, better 3.x, a few libs, some are already included as well as some extra RAM and maybe a hard disk (would be useful...).

The idea behind Rainboot is quite good: It does not only display pictures, it can also play music and samples, you can have displayed your configuration and the time and date (thanks to a cool locale program in every language), use fade effects, etc. All this has to be written down in config file using an own little programming language. The full version also features an editor for those configs, in the demo you have to write them yourself (not that easy, you have to have some patience). Three configs are included with the demo, so I tested these out, of course. It looks really nice, but is (at least for me) quite useless, since you have to insert is after the monitor setup in the startup-sequence. And at this time, my computer is already through with booting.

So am I still sitting in front of a black screen and have to close Rainboot because it only wastes my time.

The authors of Rainboot took hard measures to make people register. Every time after booting you get a nag requester and the mouse pointer is blocked for about 25 seconds. A good reason to immediately delete the demo (or to register, depending on your point of view...).

But you can't criticize the implementation. The effects are looking good, and Rainboot itself has a small and useful user interface. It supports almost all graphics boards (thanks to CyberGraphX and Picasso96), AGA and ECS.

So the only conclusion is: If you like nice graphical effects, you should give Rainboot a try. But in my opinion it is absolutely useless, only nice to look at.

Malte Mende <MacMendeX@aol.com>«