GFX Sensations 1/Graphic Sensations - Volume 1.iso/tools/amiga/show/egsflick.lha/EGSFlick/EGSFlick.doc

Text File | 1994-09-13 | 11.3 KB | 269 lines

        EGSFlick - play .FLI/.FLC animations on your EGS graphic board

                    By Frank Neumann, September 1994
                        Version 1.2, 13.09.1994

                Original source by Ron Schnell et al.

What's it ?
-----------
EGSFlick lets you play all of those nice .FLI/.FLC animations on your (EGS
supporting) graphic board that you've seen so often in Pee-Cee computer
shops demoing some strange VGA board.
As well .FLI (fixed resolution of 320x200 pixels) as .FLC (free resolution)
animation files are recognized and played.
This program is a port of the X11 program 'xflick'. Great parts of the
source have been taken over unmodified. The authors of this program so far
were:
    Ron Schnell ([e-mail])
    Klaus Ehrenfried ([e-mail])
    Michael 'Papa' ;-) Pall ([e-mail])

Lots of thanks go to these guys for somehow making EGSFlick possible.

The original program was placed in the Public Domain, with the following
conditions:
----- excerpt from original xflick.txt: -----
        xflick - Ron Schnell, March, 1991
    This code is provided as is, with no warrantees, expressed
        or implied.  I believe this code to be free of encumbrance,
        and offer it to the public domain.  I ask, however, that
    this paragraph and my name be retained in any modified
    versions of the file you may make, and that you notify me
    of any improvements you make to the code.

    Ron Schnell ([e-mail])
----- end of excerpt -----

I think by porting xflick to EGS I have not hurt any of these conditions.
I wanted to tell Ron Schnell about this port, but unfortunately there was
no user 'ronnie' at 'sos.com' - probably he has left their house. Oh well.


Requirements
------------
EGSFlick will make no attempt to convert the .FLI/.FLC file into any other
format than what it is supposed for: 8 bit, CLUT-based chunky pixel data.
For that reason, you will need a graphic board that can produce such
displays. Currently I know of the following that can do it for sure:
· Rainbow III
· Piccolo
· Spectrum

It should also work on a GVP EGS 110/24, but I haven't been able to test
that. It would also work on other boards like the Picasso II if EGS were
available for them :^).

EGSFlick will either open a window on the EGS default screen, or on a
screen whose mode name you provide with the 'EGSFLICK' environment.



Besides all this, you certainly need:
· AmigaDOS/Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 or above
· EGS (version 6 is ok but not required - I wrote this long before V6 or
  any kind of multiple-device EGS was out)
· A graphic board capable of producing the above mentioned display
· FLI files to play. I have included a small one. I once found this
  somewhere on a CD-Rom at my local PC shop, and liked it very much :-)


Usage
-----
Usage: EGSFlick [-v] [-r<count>] [-d<delay>] [-n] fli_file
 -v Verbose Debugging info
 -r<count>  Repeat count times (0 = loop forever)
 -d<delay>  Delay between frames in 1/70s
 -n         Don't interpret file before display (slower but uses less memory)

Anything more to say ? Well, maybe this:
On short anims, you can let EGSFlick unpack all images into memory and play
them from there (provided you have enough RAM free) to gain maximum speed.
With .FLCs or big .FLIs, however, it is recommended to use the -n switch.
This will cause the pictures to be unpacked while the animation is playing,
which saves a LOT of memory, but also slows down the replay speed.

To play an animation over and over, use the switch '-r0'.

If the environment variable 'EGSFLICK' is unset or set to 'default',
EGSFlick will only open a window on the default screen. If you want
this, you will first have to start the preferences program EGSScreenmode to
set the default screen's depth to 8 bit unless this is already the case on
your system.
If you have set EGSFLICK to some screen mode name, e.g.

setenv EGSFLICK "PICOa:EGS 800x600"

or

setenv EGSFLICK "LEGSa:EGS 320x240"

, EGSFlick will first try to open an 8 bit deep screen with that screen mode
name, and then open a window on that screen. Make sure that you have created
a screen mode with that name - check the list of available screen modes/names
in your system by starting 'EGSScreenmode' and browsing through the 'Display
modes' list.

While EGSFlick is loading an animation, it displays the string 'Please wait
while loading the animation' (clever, huh ? ;-) in the center of the window,
and lists the individual frames of the anim in the title bar as they are
parsed and unpacked. Once playing, the title bar shows the name of the
animation.


Keyboard control
----------------
It's quite simple. Once the animation is running, you can press:

· + to speed up the animation
· - to slow down the animation
· <Space> to pause and single-step
· c to continue after a pause/single step
· q to quit

If there are several open windows on the EGS default screen, activating
another window will change the color map to what EGSFlick thinks is the
'original' colormap. This is a sort of 'private colormap', as seen under
X11. When you re-activate the player window, the colors of the anim file
are restored. To quit the program, use either 'q' or the close gadget at
the upper left corner of the window.


Notices
-------
EGSFlick is a nice program to demonstrate the speed of a Zorro III
graphic board compared to a Zorro II board. I noticed this effect on a
programmer's meeting in Germany in August '93 (thanks again, Ill). I got
a Piccolo board from the manufacturer to show it to those who were
interested. Well, when we arrived I just plugged the board into my A3k and
started the system. I checked out several programs on the Piccolo board,
and found that my EGSFlick was not playing as fast as I was used to from
my Rainbow III. The next day a collegue asked me, 'So, Franky, you DID set
the jumper on the board to Zorro III mode, didn't you ?' (Hi, Armin ! :-).
Ok, I didn't. I set the jumper, powered up, ran EGSFlick again, and
ZZzooommmm! There it was, the usual speed :-)
Try it yourself if you have a Piccolo and a Zorro III machine: Play an
animation at maximum speed (press the '+' key several times while the anim
is playing) with the jumper once set to 'Zorro II' and then set to
'Zorro III'. I'm sure you WILL appreciate the difference between
3 MBytes/sec and 9.4 MBytes/sec 8-).

Known bugs
----------

· The 'private colormap' mechanism is just a simple hack. Whenever a running
EGSFlick window receives an EI_iACTIVEWINDOW message, it activates its
current colormap, and on the other hand when receiving an EI_iINACTIVEWINDOW
message, it restores the colormap that it thinks was the original one.
You can easily confuse EGSFlick by running two such processes simultaneously
and quitting the one you started first. This isn't sure to show the problem,
but it has done so sometimes. Don't expect anything like pen sharing. This
program was written to be fast, not well-behaving.

· The resolution of the delay is quite coarse. At the fastest rates you can
just choose between '1/50th of a second between two pictures' and 'go as fast
as you can'. Solution would be to go via the timer.device instead of
dos.library/Delay. Currently I'm too lazy/busy to change this :-}

· Originally the key to continue an animation was <Return>, not 'c'.
Unfortunately I do not get an EI_iVANILLAKEY message when the <Return> key is
pressed - Ulli believes EI_iRAWKEY should be ok for this. Well, I disagree.
AmigaDOS windows _DO_ tell me about a VANILLAKEY message caused by pressing
the <Return> key - although it is a 'non-printable' character..hint hint Ulli.

· A damaged .FLI/.FLC file is not always recognized as such by the unpacker.
You can be lucky and it tells you about problems and exits gracefully, but
you might as well see the big Guru. Sorry, I didn't write that part of the
code, and I won't go into debugging it.

· I haven't yet found out how to clearly judge if the default screen is
made up of planar or chunky pixels. For that reason, EGSFlick will try to
run e.g. on a 'NTSC:High Res' screen with 8 bits depth (AGA for instance).
However, this will most definitely crash your machine.


ToDo
----

· several things, which will probably never be done.. :-}


History
-------
The first version of this program was hacked together in two days, just
before the CeBIT'93 in Hanover at the end of March. I wanted to get this
done very quickly to have something for a friend who showed the Rainbow III
graphic board there. I think he liked it.
After that, I almost forgot about this program. Now I saw this new upload in
the AmiNet - some other .fli player - and thought I should make EGSFlick
ready for release. There is as of now so few PD/Freeware EGS software out,
maybe this will encourage some people to go ahead and release what they
have written and not yet 'published', too.

Version 1.1 (14.11.1993) :
    First released version

Version 1.1a (19.11.1993):
    Removed an E_PIXELMAP check from eflick.c - the program did not run on a
    Spectrum board. I still need to learn a lot about EGS and its
    bitmaps/types.

Version 1.2 (13.09.1994):
    After a long break, a small addition: Now listens to the environment
    variable 'EGSFLICK' which determines another screen mode than the
    default. A user on a local BBS asked for something like this, and as
    it was a 10 minute change, I put it in. However, do not expect any
    big enhancements to this program in the future - currently, I'm
    totally fallen for Linux/m68k kernel hacking :-)

Author
------

I'm a student of computer science at the University of Oldenburg, Germany
(well, at least I pretend to be one ;-). Hum...what else should I write
here ? Oh well - if you like and use this program, I'm definitely interested
in hearing about that! Let's just declare this whole package to be 'EGSware',
ok ? That means: If you like&use EGSFlick and have written some nice
program(s) for EGS, send it to me. Alternatively, I will not reject any
presents like nice POV-Ray pictures or scenes, self-made .FLIs, money,
chocolate, post cards or whatever. Send what you like :-)


Shameless plug
--------------
POV-Ray addict ? Check out ftp.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de:/pub/pov-ray :-)

Contents of this archive
------------------------

This archive should only be distributed in its unmodified form, consisting
of these files:
EGSFlick/EGSFlick           - the player binary
EGSFlick/EGSFlick.doc       - this document
EGSFlick/EGSFlick.doc.info  - no, I won't explain what this is
EGSFlick/warbeat.fli        - a demo .FLI file, 320x200, 16 frames
EGSFlick/eflick.c           - main part, argument parser, all EGS specific
                              stuff
EGSFlick/read.c             - file parser & unpacker
EGSFlick/eflick.h           - header file, structure definitions etc.
EGSFlick/Makefile           - yep, a Makefile.
EGSFlick.info               - You know. Yes, you really do.

The program has been compiled under Dice 2.07.56R, but it should also be easy
to build it under SAS. And no, no DMakefile ist included. I love gnu-make.
If you don't have it, get it NOW ! :-)


Final words
-----------
Quoting Fred Fish: Have fun !

Greetings, questions, bug reports and donations should be sent to:
+ Frank Neumann, Hauptstr. 107, 26131 Oldenburg   The Amiga still is it. +
+     InterNet: [e-mail] IRC:Franky     +
+ UUCP:[e-mail] InHouse:amigo@faramir Z-Netz:[e-mail] +
+ "All die Manta-Computer-User - Hauptsache vorne leuchtet 33Mhz auf..." +
+        - Stefan Schulze in fido.ger.amiga, 04.08.1992                  +