Technical Q&As

The Apple Media Tool and Apple Media Tool Programming Environment products have been discontinued. For more information check out: AMT/PE Discontinued.

AMT_PE 26 - Transparency not Working on Laptops (1-Aug-95)

Q We have been seeing a problem on certain laptops where transparency for PICT images doesn't work. The symptoms are that the white areas of a graphic object are visible on the screen instead of being transparent. What would cause this and how can we work around it?

A There is a system-level command that, if missing, could cause transparency to fail. This command is "transparency=bitmap", and it should be in the AMT.INI file in the Windows directory. If this command is not there, add it to the file (you may have to create the AMT.INI file if it doesn't presently exist).

If you are using Apple Media Tool 1.2, the default behavior (with no AMT.INI) is to compute the transparency in software. To force the hardware to compute the transparency, you must have an AMT.INI file that includes "transparency=bitmap" (not "transparency=driver").

Some Apple Media Tool applications create an .INI file that is named other than AMT.INI in the same directory as their executable file. If you use such a file, make sure it contains "transparency=bitmap", not "transparency=driver".

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