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- HDVIEW3.PRG
- by Walt Sullivan
-
- CIS: 76367,200
- DELPHI: WALTSULLIVAN
-
- HDVIEW3.PRG is a direct-from-disk animation viewer that plays ".DLT"
- files created by programs in the CYBER series and others. It differs
- from the ANIMATE?.PRG players in that it can display an animation of
- any size. It does this by reading the delta information from a disk
- file and displaying the animation 'on the fly'. Needless to say, it
- can't approach the 30 frames per second speed of the RAM resident
- players, but it can display that 900K animation that you slaved over
- and then found out wouldn't fit in your 1040ST. It will show low rez
- files if you are in low or medium rez and high rez files if you are
- in high rez.
-
- HDVIEW3.PRG always operates in the Forward mode, i.e. frame #'last'
- is followed by frame #1. It also always operates in Double Buffered
- mode. I found that there was no discernable speed difference between
- single & double buffering, and the display didn't look as good in
- single mode since you could see the 'wave' of screen updates proceed
- down the screen. Other than those two exceptions, HDVIEW3 operates
- in a similar way to the ANIMATE? programs. The Function keys control
- the speed of display where F10 = full speed and F1 = 1.5 seconds per
- frame. The SPACE bar pauses the display and any key resumes. The
- HELP key brings up the file selector box, and the UNDO key takes you
- back to the desktop. The file selector box show ".PI1" files when
- you are in low or medium rez and ".PI3" file when in high. It should
- catch incorrect rez files and selecting a "PI?" when there is no ".DLT"
- file to go with it.
-
- I would like to thank Tom Hudson for publishing the DLT file spec here
- on Compuserve. And I also want to thank Dan Matejka for his article
- "Al and C Routines..." in STart #1. I am a C programmer and not very
- familiar with 68000 Assembly Language. In this article he discussed
- longword memory_move and initialization routines in 68000 AL. I modified
- these routines to do a fast screen copy from a work area to the viewable
- area and to erase the screen by init'ing it to zeros.
-
- This program was developed with the Megamax C Development System on an
- Atari 1040ST with color & monochrome monitors.
-