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Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 12:46 am
by ahenry3068
And.... Found Dave's Targa Animator... I actually remember using that back in the day to make FLI files.
The heck with my ATARI program and Hatari. I've got almost all the pieces together to set up a FREEDOS
system and its going to be a FAST FreeDOS system P4 3.0 ghz. (single core) 1 gb of RAM.
Back when I used DTA I was using it on a 486 75 mhz system.
I've found enough FLI examples to get started on the player... I need to finish my other two projects first.
An FLI decoder is going to be a challenge on the X16 platform but I think I can make it usable.
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 4:08 pm
by TomXP411
Hi, guys.
I split this topic off from the Bad Apple download topic, since this got a bit off topic and stopped being a review of or questions about the Bad Apple demo.
The FLI animator does sound interested, and it will be interesting to see where this goes. Good luck!
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 11, 2023 9:59 pm
by ahenry3068
I'm getting kind of excited about doing this. I hope to finish my final set of features on Life in the next couple days.
HANGMAN is going to take longer. But I've got two versions planned for it. The first version won't take to long.
Hopefully by end of July. Then In August I can start throwing myself into writing a FLI decoder.
I still work full time and have other things going on too.. Couple more years until retirement
..
Thank you for breaking this out Tom... I really got started in the BadApple thread because it was kind of an
inspiration to attempt this project.
I've been playing with animated GIF's and FLI files in Linux and DOS Box the last few days. Desertfish got 60 fps in his Bad Apple demo
I've calculated for FLI player decoding I'm dealing with worst case 4 times the data to VERA Ram so 15 fps is doable, I hope. But I have to decode the chunks between frame writes. However if a FLI is carefully designed and encoded I'm not drawing a full frame every time. If I can get 10-15 fps it will be a useful tool.
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Wed Jul 12, 2023 1:08 am
by ahenry3068
I sent a PM to TomXP411 a few weeks ago when the FLIPLAYER project was just starting
to percolate. He told me then I should post in the FORUMS so belatedly here it is.
Re: VERA MODES
Sent: Wed Jun 28, 2023 2:56 pm
From: TomXP411
Recipient: ahenry3068
ahenry3068 wrote: ↑Wed Jun 28, 2023 8:00 am
I have a specific technical question.
CAN The VERA be set to ouput 320x200 pixels (possibly just centered on the 640x240 screen ?)
One of my early Pascal projects when I was younger was an FLI decoder.
Excuse me if this is patronizing, I don't know your age or background. FLI was
an early animation format... Very simple in implementation. It was specifically designed
and optimized for PC VGA mode 13. Which was similiar to VERA $80 but only
had 200 vertical lines.. It had no audio... Just animation frames.
It only required about 10 - 15 fps to look ok...... I'm really not sure if the 65C02 and VERA can
handle that but I've got a hankering to try. If I do this it will start in C or Pascal. But as my original
project (30 yrs ago...lol) it will be rewritten frame type by frame type as inline assembly.
The code I wrote back around 1996 got > 40 fps on a 486 25mhz and ran at least OK on low end 386 and High end 80286 systems.
You should really ask these questions in the forum, where other people can weigh in.
the answer is... VERA always runs at 640x480 resolution, but you can scale the display to other resolutions. It just so happens that the only other resolution that will fit with integer scaling is 320x240.
If you want to display a 320x200 FLI, you'd need to just crop the bottom 40 rows. It will be slightly squished, since the PC's pixels were not square on the CGA 256 color mode... which was always something that annoyed me, back when I was learning to program the original IBM PC in 1982.
Last edited by TomXP411 on Wed Jun 28, 2023 2:57 pm, edited 1 time in total.
By the way to Tom: I had a sheltered childhood, the closest I got to a computer in 1982 was ATARI PONG and a TI programmable calculator. I'm probably a little unique on here that my very first programming experience in about 1984 was on a 32 bit system.
Each User had 1 mb of user RAM and the total Hard Drive Storage was 1.6 gigabytes. (Yes, In 1984). Of course the Hard Disk wasn't even called that. The system had 4 "HARD PACKS" each holding 400 mb and each about the size of a Kitchen Chair and weighing a bit over 100 lbs each. The computer itself was about 12 ft wide and 7' tall. I'm almost sure no-one else here has ever used the O.S. on that system either. The system was SNAP II .. Which was the U.S. Navy's maintenance Data system in the 1980's .. It was my formative system. If I remember the O.S. Nomenclature correctly it was "HARRIS VIRTUAL SYSTEM 5"
The available compilers were BASIC, FORTRAN & COBOL.
Bad Apple as FLI.... PCX Too
Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2023 10:51 pm
by ahenry3068
Made the decision today that another useful program will come out of this Project first.
There are Dozen's of Graphics file formats out there these days. I've already used BVLOAD
to load a 320x240 graphics bitmap on the X16 screen. Problem is that Bitmap was just
a memory dump from VERA Ram using VPEEK. It first had to be drawn using BASIC
commands. BVLOAD was quite quick. Not fast enough for animation but I think it loaded in less
than 1 second. Saving the Screen with VPEEK was however, quite painful.....
A general purpose Graphics format that arbitrary Paint programs might be able to manipulate
would be quite useful for X16.... So.. I'm going all the way back to PCX. My initial
program will deliberately limit itself to 320x240x8 bit PCX files.. Since thats the closest to
VERA native. It will be a way to ease myself into programming the VERA directly and
be useful in its own way.. I'm sure GIMP still supports PCX and I bet NET.Paint supports it too.
Bad Apple as FLI.... PCX Too
Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2023 11:50 pm
by ahenry3068
I might end up doing GIF. Its going to be slow on the X16.
I don't think I'll try .JPEG. Its probably technically possible but I still remember .JPEG
being slow on anything less than a 486 DX2 .
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2023 4:44 pm
by kelli217
Yeah, JPEG is slow even on a 386-25.
I once thought of trying to do a first-pass JPEG decoder on the C64 in character mode using redefined characters as the 8x8 macroblocks. The idea was to only have the very first macroblock layer show up, since theoretically that should at least give a very rough idea of the image content. And I'd have used extended background color mode, which is fine since there are only 64 macroblocks defined in the JPEG standard and EBC mode reduces the character set to 64 characters total. And it was only going to be the Y layer, no Pr or Pb, so greyscale, and there are 5 grey levels in the C64 palette.
But in practice, so many layers go into each block that just using the first layer results in garbage that has absolutely no resemblance to the original image. I never even got to the point of trying to actually do any of this; it was enough to see multiple demonstrations of what a JPEG image looks like at various stages of reconstitution.
Anyway...
If I might suggest, take a look at how Jim Leonard did the Bad Apple segment of his 8088 Domination demo. He's documented it on his website.
https://trixter.oldskool.org/2014/06/19 ... em-part-1/
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 12:42 am
by ahenry3068
I hadn't seen that demo before.. Its actually extremely encouraging. It even gave me flashbacks to the last time I wrote an FLI decoder
.
I'm kinda hoping FLI compression takes care of the "Updating only part of the Screen" thing. I've got to get to writing the code
to see that though.
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 1:00 am
by ahenry3068
I really need to finish Hangman.. At the same time. I'm becoming committed to this thread too.
Started a little code.. Just to see how much I remember C.
For the time being just the PCX header def. at a loss in a couple spots put placeholder code.
I'm sure you can put an array in a Struct but I couldn't remember the syntax. Also not sure I got
the datatypes correct... Its been many,many,many moons since I wrote any C code.
Code: Select all
struct PCXH {
ubyte id;
ubyte ver;
ubyte enc;
ubyte bits;
ubyte minx;
ubyte miny;
uword maxx;
uword maxy;
uword hDPI;
uword yDPI;
48 bytes EGA Pallette
ubyte reserved;
ubyte planes;
uword bytesperline;
uword colormode;
uword hRes;
uword vRes;
54 bytes reserved;
}
Re: Bad Apple as FLI (Autodesk Animator) file.
Posted: Tue Jul 18, 2023 1:06 am
by ahenry3068
If I get this a little further along and compiling I'll probably write a first program just to read the Header
and see if I can support the file.
I'm coming at C damn near as a beginner.
I've been doing a lot a mental flow charting on this code. I still think the first version will
only support 320x240 files. But I don't think it will be a big jump to support lower
resolutions. And only a slight jump to support downscaling a 640x480 pcx.