Known incompatabilty between PEGGER and other programs DPS Personal Animation Recorder ------------------------------- 9-28-93 Notes on: The Personal Animation Recorder by Digital Processing Systems, Inc. and interfacing PEGGER, version 1.2 refer: Greg Heifner Several problems and work arounds have been discovered in the operation of PEGGER and the Personal Animation Recorder (PAR). Sadly, we could not obtain a unit from Digital prior to our release of PEGGER. Only recently I personaly purchased one for my own use, after hearing from many pleased users of both PEGGER and the PAR. The quality of the PAR is superb and PEGGER greatly enhances it's use. As a result we will be learning all we can about the PAR in order to potentialy solve the existing problems. The PAR in it's simplest form is a digital hard disk based video recording deck. Individual framestores or IFF 24 files are sent to the PAR for processing into an animation file or a series of stills. These images are stored and played back through the use of a high speed IDE drive that is accessed through the PAR software/hardware. Idealy, PEGGER would be used to "SNOOP" your directory of stored sequential animation files that are in JPEG form. As the PAR file handling software requested the image, PEGGER would decompress the file and hand it off to the PAR. Unfortunatly, as best we can tell now, the PAR file handling software doesn't support several DOS calls needed by PEGGER to handle the files successfully. Not all is lost. It is just the PAR file handling software that seems to be trouble for us. If you use a file system utility (such as DirMaster, DirOpus or PEGGER's batch decompress (DJPEG) window, you'll see that the volume "DDR:" is available to you when PAR is running in the background. The best way to use PAR is to set up PAR for the animation or still process and then just copy the files you need to the proper directory (Project), in the volume "DDR:" and the files will be decompressed by snoop, then fed directly to the PAR. Or you can just DJPEG the batch to "DDR:" and everything will also work smoothly. The conflict is between PEGGER and the PAR's file handling utility. When the PAR file handler is active, several functions within PEGGER stop operating for some, as of yet, unknown reason. None of these symptoms have any "lethal" properties to your system. Here is the best proceedure I have found to single frame record an animation from a sequence of JPEG images; 1) Launch the PAR system. 2) Set up the project, filter and anim or still frame functions of PAR. 3) Setup the PAR "Projects" window to highlite the proper project (directory) for the incoming frames. 4) Hold left "Amiga" "M" to switch screens to the workbench. 5) Start PEGGER and set up snoop to decompress as IFF24 the directory of your JPEG files you wish to process. 6) Start a directory utility such as DirOpus. 7) Copy the needed sequential JPEG files to volume "DDR:" 8) You will see the frames as they are processed on the video output of the PAR. When the copy is complete, hit "Amiga" "M" again to switch to the PAR screen. The PAR requester should say "DONE." Hit OK and follow the PAR requests to name the finished animation file. You're done. Alternate method two involves not using the snoop function of PEGGER and just using the batch decompress PEGGER module (DJPEG). The "TO" volume would be "DDR:. All the function of the PAR file system work just fine while PEGGER is running, it's PEGGER that doesn't like what's going on with the PAR file handling system. We will talk to Digital's programer and try to solve the problem soon. Although, you may prefer the above methods, as programs like DirOpus and DirMaster are much more complete file transfer programs than the PAR system is ever likly to be. Deluxe Paint AGA ---------------- We have discovered a few problems when using Pegger with Deluxe Paint AGA which could cause users several headaches. First, there appears to be a bug in Deluxe Paint AGA which occurs when trying to load a 24-bit IFF image. DPaint will ask you if you want to change the screen format to that of the file (X-Resolution x Y-Resolution x 24-bit). If the user chooses "yes" on this option, it is assumed that the screen format will be one of the AA HAM resolution modes that would be closest to the actual resolution of the 24-bit image. Unfortunately, DPaint instead opens up a 256 color screen that is nearest to the actual image resolution and loads the image as a 256-color dithered version of the original 24-bit image; not the HAM8 image that the user expects! The only way to work around this problem is to respond "no" to the 24-bit question that Deluxe Paint asks the user. This, of course, assumes that the user has chosen one of the AA-HAM modes (using 64 colors) when starting Deluxe Paint AGA. The AA-HAM modes using 64 colors are HAM8 modes and the images saved in this format are of the type that Pegger is capable of compressing (either manually or through the SNOOP process). Secondly, HAM8 resolution IFF images are normally saved with a 64 color palette. However, Deluxe Paint AGA saves these images out with a 256 color palette. This is incorrect for the IFF standard and we have had to make Pegger aware of this problem with Deluxe Paint AGA in order to correctly compress the HAM8 images. Hopefully, Electronic Arts will solve these inconsistencies with Deluxe Paint AGA in the future but fortunately for now, we have been able to establish simple workarounds for them. Video Toaster - Toaster Paint ----------------------------- Toaster Paint can not load IFF 24 images through PEGGER's SNOOP. If you try to do this, the image loaded into Toaster Paint will be all black. There are two ways around this bug in Toaster Paint. First, you could setup PEGGER to SNOOP for Toaster Frame Stores, Toaster Paint can load a Frame Store using PEGGER's SNOOP. The other option is to set the SNOOP_CRIPPLE tooltype in PEGGER's icon to YES. Refer to your PEGGER manual for more information on the SNOOP_CRIPPLE tooltype. PEGGER Changes Version 1.2 We found out the Deluxe Paint AGA has a bug in how it saves HAM8 images. It was including a 256 color palette instead of the 64 color palette that HAM8 requires. Since there wasn't a 64 color palette, PEGGER would not JPEG compress HAM8 files created by Deluxe Paint AGA. We made an exception for this, and now PEGGER will compress the HAM8 files created by Deluxe Paint AGA. The CJPEG Background Process was incorrectly reporting an ARexx Error as a DOS File System error. Fixed. The estimate of Free Disk Space displays in the Snoop, CJPEG Batch Directory, and DJPEG Batch Directory windows displayed the wrong values when the estimate was -10 MB or more. This has been fixed. CJPEG was incorrectly identifying IFF HAM8 animation files as a single HAM8 image it could compress. If you were doing a REPLACE, PEGGER would not just JPEG compress the first frame of the HAM8 animation, but delete the animation. This has been fixed, PEGGER now recognizes the HAM8 animations as a type of IFF file that it CAN'T compress. Added two new ARexx scripts, copy_source.peg and copy_destination.peg. Read the ARexx scripts for more information about these. Version 1.1 The manual incorrectly shows how to get the source and destination filenames for the Pre and Post ARexx scripts. The correct way is to use the ARexx command ARG, not the function, as follows: ARG source, destination There is also an ARexx script called debug.peg in the Rexx directory of PEGGER which shows how to debug scripts, and the correct way to get the source and destination filenames.