Hello everyone!
Today, we’re going to make a Slideshow for your Super Nintendo using Lion’s Slideshow Creator.
These are legacy tools that no longer work on modern operating systems.
But worry not!
There is still a way, as we’ll show here using Windows 10.
First, we need to gather some resources.
All of these can be found on Google, or in the description box accompanying this video.
DOSBox, or any equivalent software that emulates an MS-DOS environment.
Version 1.8 of Handmade Software’s shareware image editing software, Image Alchemy.
A modern photo editor.
This one is entirely up to your preference, but I recommend Irfanview.
Lion’s Slideshow Creator.
And of course, some pictures to display!
Now that we have everything we need, it’s time to set up.
Create a directory on your hard drive that’s easy to type out.
Something like C:\dosthings.
Inside this folder, extract the contents of SLIDESV3.ZIP.
Next, create two folders.
Name one ALCH, and other one PICS.
Extract the contents of ALCH1_8.ZIP into the ALCH folder.
Next, before we move any pictures into the PICS folder, we need to prepare them.
For each picture that you want in your slideshow, you need to crop and resize it so that it’s exactly 320x200 pixels.
Beware that the upcoming slideshow conversion process will add a letterbox and cut off the edges of this picture,
so keep all of the important visual content near the center.
You can experiment with this if you need to.
Once you’re happy with your crop, save the image as a BMP.
These bitmap files can go in the PICS folder.
Now it’s time to start the conversion process.
Open up DOSBox.
On the first screen, type “mount” followed by the letter "c", followed by the directory that you chose.
In this case, it’s “mount c c:\dosthings”.
Once you've entered that, type “C:” and then press Enter again.
You are now inside the folder you’ve created.
Type “cd alch” to go into the Alchemy folder, and then type “gui” to launch the program.
Once inside, click “File” and “Select Input Image”.
Browse to your pictures directory and select the first image.
Next, click “File” and “Select Output Type”.
Near the bottom of the list is “PCX”.
Click on that, and then specify further that you want PCX and not DCX.
Next, click on “Colors” and select 256 from the dropdown menu.
Finally, click File, then “Convert!”.
The resulting PCX file will appear in the ALCH directory.
Repeat this process for each image in your PICS directory.
Finally, it’s time to create the slideshow.
Close out of Alchemy by selecting File and then Quit.
Type in “cd ..” to move up one directory in DOSBox
Now, type in “SLIDES.EXE” followed by the full path to the directory that you put Alchemy within.
In this case, it looks like this: "SLIDES.EXE C:\ALCH"
Press enter and wait for the conversion to complete.
And just like that, you have a ROM in your folder!
You can load this into your emulator or flash cart of choice.
Now just sit back and enjoy!