******* AntiFlicker is found on the EXTRAS disk this issue ******* AntiFlicker.ReadMe ================== Amiga Alzheimers Cure --------------------- by Randall King  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ Hands up all you 4 million Amiga owners who've made a valiant attempt at setting your Workbench screen to "High Res Interlaced" on a standard Commodore monitor, and then abandoned it after having your brains jellified by the dreaded "flicker" horror. Getting a dark monitor screen filter helps a little bit, but the flicker still sends you psycho. OK, I know people have different flicker thresholds, but this is ridiculous! And who's going to fork out the cash for a Flicker Fixer and/or fancy multisych/VGA monitor? More than ye olde A500s or A2000s are worth these days..... So, we long suffering Amigans skinflint along with these retarded 640x256 High Res PAL screens whilst folks in PC land swoon around with their SuperVGA's squillions of pixel resolutions. Sob, we don't deserve to be second class citizens. ENTER ANTIFLICKER, a venerable little PD German software utility that's apparently been hanging around Europe and CompuServe for a couple of years. I hadn't seen it around before, and it ain't on Fish. But it's one of my best little PD presents. So in the spirit of PD share and care, I've created various Icons and this documentation to make it easy for you. Sounds simple, and it it is. Too good to be true? Give it a go - what have you got to lose? What's The Buzz --------------- HiRes Interlace gives you a Workbench that's twice the size of the retarded version - a minimum of 640x512 (more with overscan). That means more room for windows, more room for Icons, more usable lines on editors, CLI window and applications. A whole new outlook on life in general really!!! Now your screen looks like a real computer. And not for $1000 worth of hardware, but for the measly price of an Amiga PD disk. AntiFlicker is for 4 colour Workbenches (or monochrome, yuk). I've road tested it on WB V1.3, 2.0 and 2.1 just fine. As far as I know it'll probably work on WB1.2 and earlier as well if your system is still in the dark ages. Flicker is caused by insufficient speed on the Ami clock (tied to composite video scanning rates) to get around the 6 colour planes fast enough to avoid flicker when scanning all the lines from top to bottom in the 2 passes that interlace monitor needs. The further apart (#planes) the the colours of YOUR screen palette are in the screen register planes, the greater the flicker. This flicker is worst with single pixel horizontal lines on high res. Unfortunately this is just what all the worbench window borders have! Antiflicker does some basic screen antialising. All the fonts thicken up (which actually makes them easier to read anyway), and all the single horizontal lines are thickened to at least two pixels. From my amateur glance at the source, it also looks like it's swapping around colour sequence in the bit planes too. See the Antiflicker.DOC Compuserve partial translation from German for further info. What's The Catch? ----------------- Who cares that you can't change your palette colours on the WB screen again until you turn off the Antiflicker - just by rerunning it. Change your palette and away you go again! OK this doesn't ELIMINATE the flicker, but its now eminently usable. Especially with a perspex monitor filter (Harris HiTek, $39.95, (02)671-1856 highly recommended. These just pop on and off your Commodore 108? or Philips 8333, or 8854 screen from a "hanger"). And it's only the Workbench screen windows that get Interlace zapped, not any of your application Public (custom) Screens. See plea for hackers below. But you can get a long way with just this. By the way, some applications have the option of opening as a straight Workbench window overlay, instead of an entirely separate Screen. Then the anti-flicker is inherited. For example, Directory Opus (the great commercial Oz directory utility) can be set to open as a WB anti-flicker window overlay rather than its custom screen (use Configuration-->Screen-->Depth-->Workbench option). Oh. Of course, a bigger screen means more pixels. More pixels means more Chip Ram to display it. The good things in life just take more. So keep an eye on your chip memory guage (or use the AVAIL command) if you're stuck with only 512K of chip on your system. Misbehaviour?? Well, so far I've only found one other multitasking program that goes haywire when Antiflicker is running on my production A2000/WB2.1 - that's TERM (the PD communications program. Maybe someone cold help explain why?). Anyway, to stop the screen going beserk, all you have to do is invoke the RunAntiFlicker Icon before you go into a sensitive program, and on again when you've existed. Do It For All Humanity ---------------------- Think not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country... AntiFlicker is hardcoded to only zap the WBScreen. Well, what would be REALLY NEAT is for one of you hackers with a hot compiler to supercharge this beastie. Make its scope generic so that it can be executed for any user-specifed Public Screen. It doesn't have to be Modula-2. SAS will do, it's only a little program. The source is included here (as required by the author). Please send our PD libraries a copy of the mods, (and dont forget one for me please!). And while you're at it, how about a full translation of the German doks and a technical explanation of its colour remixing? Happy Workbenching. Randall King VisionSell MultiMedia 16 Northview Place, Mt Colah, NSW Australia. 2079. ah. (02)476-5438 Internet king@snoc02.enet.dec.com  ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[ ]] 32 [[