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1991-11-21
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Spliner
A Spline Screen Blanker Commodity
Graphics by Tom Rokicki
User Interface and Docs by Sebastiano Vigna
Tom Rokicki's Mackie is one of the most well-known and most beautiful
utilities for the Amiga. It has two separate functionalities: it's a blanker
which draws wonderful splines, and a powerful hot-key manager.
What I did was taking out the spline code from the original Mackie sources
and encapsulate it in a standard Commodity (of course, this means someone
else will have to port the hot-key part...).
Commodities are the new way, designed by Commodore, by which all special
utilities like mouse accelerators, macro expanders etc. should be designed.
This standard, available *only* under 2.0, allows easy and customizable
control of the interaction of different utilities. This means, of course,
that Spliner will work only under 2.0.
In the process of moving to 2.0, some new features were added, namely
programmable pattern change timeout, and the possibily to open the blank
screen in *any* of the modes available on your Amiga.
For the generic use of a Commodity, please refer to the 2.0 manual. Spliner
will (more or less) work just like the screen blanker supplied on the
Workbench 2.0 disk.
If you activate Spliner by double-clicking on its icon, you will see a
little window popping up. The meaning of the HIDE and QUIT gadgets and menu
items are identical to the ones of Commodore's blanker. The TIMEOUT gadget
lets you set the number of seconds after which the screen is blanked, while
the gadget CHANGE lets you set the time after which the drawing pattern is
changed. Set this to zero to go psychedelic. 8^) Both default to 60. The
CYCLE COLORS checkbox allows you to enable/disable the color cycling (mainly
for special screen modes such as 2024_10Hz). The IMMEDIATE EFFECT gadget
blanks immediately (after 1 second) the screen (this feature was coded by
Jean-Michel Bezeau).
The list displayed on the right represents all video modes installed on your
system. This list could also include some modes that aren't really
displayable on your Amiga, but no harm can be done. You can click on any
display mode in order to force Spliner to use that kind of display when
blanking the screen.
There are five extra tooltypes: TIMEOUT, CHANGE, DISPLAY, CYCLE and BLANK.
The first four act just like the corresponding gadgets. Note that the name
you set DISPLAY to must be an exact copy of the name appearing in the window
list (up to lower/upper casing). For instance, DISPLAY=PAL:Lores-Interlaced.
If you have a PAL (resp. NTSC) Amiga and you have a real MultiSync monitor,
you can even add the NTSC (resp. PAL) monitor to your system and open the
blank screen with another video frequency! This has no usefulness at all,
but it's amusing. The CYCLE tooltype can of course be set to ON or OFF.
BLANK lets you specify an hotkey (in the same format as CX_POPKEY) which
will immediately (after 1 second) blank the screen, just like the IMMEDIATE
EFFECT gadget (the delay is necessary because otherwise the input event
caused by the hotkey would unblank the screen).
In order to start Spliner at power-up, the best thing is to move its icon
into the WBStartup drawer, and to set its tooltypes to the desired values.
Don't forget to add the DONOTWAIT tooltype, too. You'd probably also want to
set CX_POPUP=NO. Another thing to consider is that since Spliner reads the
display modes in the graphical database, you must be sure Mode_Names is ran
before it. In order to obtain this, you should add the tooltype
STARTPRI=-120.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: Some people think that terrific blankers steal CPU time.
This is not the case with Spliner. If a task is using the CPU, Spliner will
stop drawing. If in particular your application has a hi-res multi-color
screen, the presence of the blank screen will actually speed up whatever the
Amiga is doing, by lessening DMA contention.
This program is copyrighted, but freely distributable. Permission is hereby
granted to distribute it provided both this documentation accompanies the
executable and that no charge is made for its distribution. Comments,
complaints, desiderata are welcome.
Sebastiano Vigna
Via Valparaiso 18
I-20144 MILANO MI
BIX: svigna
UUCP:...{uunet|piramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmita!sebamiga!seba