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- Short: Example of the Fast SLZ compression routine
-
- A short while ago, I posted a new compression routine to C.S.A.P. that
- featured extremely fast decompression. The article is included in this
- archive that describes the algorithms and has source code. I have also
- written a program that decompresses data to CHIP memory (the bat2bat.anim).
- I have achieved very fast speeds with this (over 20 fps on an Amiga 3000/25
- which is about 700K/second to CHIP MEMORY). There is no double-buffering
- of the animation. The flicker that results is minimal though and is also
- useful. This is mostly due to the fact that I am using interleaved bitplanes
- (they work under 1.3 even). If you can count the lines of flicker, divide 60
- by this number and you'll get a rough frame rate (50 on PAL). Then if the
- lines crawl down, you know you are actually going faster than this rough frame
- rate and if the lines crawl up you are going slower than this frame rate. Even
- on a stock 68000, you should see at least 12 fps or about 400K/second
- decompression to CHIP. Note that although this is slower than the anim format,
- it is NOT using delta compression -- it is using each frame compressed! The
- file is also smaller (even though it's an executable) than the original bat2bat
- animation available on Aminet which also requires an external anim player.
-
- NOTE: These high decompression speeds were achieved without turning
- off multitasking with Forbid() and were running on a moderate/light loaded
- system (Cygnus Ed, WorkBench, a CLI, WB Clock, and a couple of commodities
- [Blanker, Exchange, CrossDos]). The Amiga 3000/25 had 1 M CHIP and 4 M Fast
- and the 68000 was an A2000 with 1 M CHIP and 2 M Fast.
-
- The source code to this animation will be made available at a later
- date as I wish to integrate the tools I wrote to grab the animation and
- change it into SLZ compressed form. This way intermediate users will have
- less difficulty with the animation environment.
-
- Adisak Pochanayon
- pochanay@cae.wisc.edu
-