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AMGIF vn 0.5 - Amiga IFF to GIF converter

Converts Amiga IFF pictures to GIF.  Supports 320x200 & 320x400 in up to
32 colors or HAM mode, and 640x200 & 640x400 in up to 16 colors.  HAM mode
pictures are reduced to 256 colors.


This is an early version of this program.  I don't really see it changing
much, except to fix bugs, and maybe some speedup, but its too soon to
declare this as version 1.0.

This program is basically the same as IFF2GIF, by Steve Wilhite (and uses
the modules COMPRESS.C and BUILDGIF.C from that program...), but will also
convert HAM pictures.  It also might be a bit faster with non-HAM pictures.
It is used identically to IFF2GIF.

It does, however, require a significant amount of memory to run.  (roughly
200-300K, depending on resolution...)  It can also require over 512K for
pictures in Hires interlaced mode (ie 640 x 400).  If you only have 512K
and want to convert a 640 x 400 picture, you can still use IFF2GIF for this.
AMGIF will eventually support a low memory usage mode, but since IFF2GIF can
handle that for now, it doesn't.

HAM images can take a significant amount of time to encode, mainly due to
the calculations required to sort and remap the colors.  HAM images are
reduced to a 256 color map, choosing the most frequently used colors for the
color map, and remapping all the other used colors to the nearest match in
that color map.  Many HAM images will not suffer much from this.  Others may
suffer significantly.  It depends on the image.

Note that AMGIF doesn't do Extra-Halfbrite pics currently, mainly because I
don't know the format for them and have none to test with.  I suspect that
they will be incorrectly identified as HAM pics.  This may be added later.


Thanks to Steve Wilhite, who wrote COMPRESS.C and BUILDGIF.C, which
are used in this program.  He also wrote IFF2GIF.C, which I heavily
remodeled to become AMGIF.

Thanks also to Jim Kent, who wrote JIFF.C, which is also used in
this program to read IFF pics.

-->Steve Bennett           Compuserve:[70046,441]        01/03/88