Sept. 6

How To View:

Showanim -c +2 Marble.anim  (pretty easy huh?)

Why I Did It:     (I plead insanity)


   Marble is an old animation from the ST, it's been around over a year
now.  Having used VideoScape 3D just to create frame by frame animation I
remembered this old demo and although it uses few (16) colors, it is still
pretty good.  By freak chance a friend who owns an ST still had the first
version of the demo which had each picture (16 total) on a disk, and the
animation program would load each picture and show them first from 1 to 16
and back again.  A few weeks after this version hit the systems someone
merged all the pictures into one file much the way videoscape does.  haveing
gotten the old disk from my friend,  I nulled the 16 pictures over the the
Amiga and converted them into IFF format.  Being that they were from an ST,
someone had put the letters "IRATA" on each screen (Atari backwards) for
whatever reason (maybe saying that Atari is a backwards company :-> )
Anyway, I removed this from each frame.  Using videoscape I loaded each
frame as a background and being in the ANIM record mode the program
compressed each picture the same way it does when you are doing animations.
After the first run, loading in the pictures from 1 to 16 and back again,
the animation looked just like the ST version.  Well, just a little flicker
--no big deal.  I disliked the black border and so I created a full video
screen with Dpaint II and loaded that as a background and the marble
pictures as a forground.  So now the file has no border to speak of.  Wow,
real important,  oh well, I did not like it, so, that's all that mattered at
the time.  The project was quite easy,  the only think that would present
trouble to someone who wanted to create animation this way is the fact that
videoscape has a fixed pallette.  (Or at least that's what I think).  You
can load Anytime or any other pop up pallette and change the colors within
the program, but that way is not very easy to make the videoscape colors
match those of the pictures exactly.  So, what I did was do a hex dump of
a picture file and get the CMAP info, then with NEWZAP (best $15 I've ever
spent) I loaded in the .Anim file and change the CMAP section to match the
picture.  Now the file is perfect, just load and go.
   As I said before the total number of pictures used was 16 and they are
played first on direction and then in the reverse.  So there are 16 frames
going down and 16 going up.


   If you have any comments (remarks about my using STs :-) ) about this
file -- Just trying to get my name out there you see -- you can reach me on
the following systems.

CIS    - 74666,51  <---- 666 Number of the beast, wot?
PL     - JDawes
BIX    - Jdawes
Genie  - Myth
Delphi - Jaws


Jay Dawes

PS.   Two weeks!  Two weeks!  Sorry just slipped out.  (Sorta a general
summary of the time frame Atari gives for it's product realeases)