Trace v1.0 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This program is FREE. You may distribute it at will, provided you 1) do not charge any money for it, 2) distribute it WITH the documentation, and 3) do not change the program or documentation in ANY WAY. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.) Intro ----- TRACE.PRG is an interactive graphics/sound/text learning tool. You can use it to link together various screen graphics with sound and text files, and merge the whole thing into an interactive presentation. 2.) The "cover yer butt" section ---------------------------- This is my second program to be released into the public domain. No one sued me when I released my first program (thank you very much), but I still feel compelled to add this little blurb. I've downloaded enough software to have noticed that almost EVERYONE puts in a disclaimer of some kind. I copped this one from a public domain program. It seems to have enough legal mumbo jumbo to discourage any litigious griper. This software is freeware. As such, it is provided on an as-is basis, with absolutely no warantees, either express or implied, including, but not limited to performance, usefulness, reliability, fitness for a particular purpose or merchantability. The user assumes any and all risk involved in the use of this software. In no event will the author be liable for direct, indirect, incidental, or consequential damages resulting from the use of, or inability to use, this software. So there! 3.) We are not alone ---------------- TRACE is much like Dave Beckers CONNECTIONS program. I downloaded CONNECTIONS last weekend and was amazed at how similar it was to TRACE, which I have been working on for about 2 months quite independent from Mr. Becker. In my view, CONNECTIONS is more of a full featured multimedia program, while TRACE is narrower in scope, but hopefully easier to use. I debated whether or not to release TRACE into the public domain, because it would be nice to have a "defacto standard" for Atari multimedia work, and I'd just as soon have CONNECTIONS fill that role. But, the more I played with CONNECTIONS the more I missed some of TRACE's features, so I decided to upload TRACE to GEnie after all. Some reasons for using CONNECTIONS: 1.) If animations are important to you use CONNECTIONS. TRACE doesn't support them at all. 2.) CONNECTIONS can display small graphics on the screen, TRACE only deals with full screen displays. 3.) CONNECTIONS allows you to run external applications as a part of the multimedia session (admittedly I haven't gotten this feature to work very well on my system, but it is available). 4.) CONNECTIONS can display scrolling text windows, while TRACE is limited to rather small static text displays. Some reasons for using TRACE: 1.) TRACE works in all three ST resolutions, CONNECTION only works in monochrome. Since I wanted TRACE to be geared to children, I thought color graphics was a must. Black and white pictures just don't seem to hold a kids attention as well as a color picture no matter how good the resolution. 2.) TRACE uses Dave Baggett's freeware PLAY.PRG program to replay sound samples. PLAY.PRG is a fine program with many features that TRACE can take advantage of, including utilizing the STe's DMA sound capability. To replay sound samples you MUST have PLAY.PRG in the same directory as TRACE.PRG. 4.) OK, OK, what'zit do? -------------------- TRACE allows you to create an interactive (there's that word again!) presentation using DEGAS picture files, sound files and text files. You load a DEGAS picture onto the screen and, using the mouse, define areas on the picture which will playback sounds or display text or show another picture. The pictures can be chained together to form an intricate (or simple) heirarchy of graphics, sounds and text. There's a simple demo included in the download for you to try out. If you click on TRACE.PRG, your'll be presented with a picture of the starship Enterprise. Click on the "saucer section" and forward "drive section" to play some sound effects. Click on the warp nacelle to display a little text info. Press the ESC key to end the program. 5.) Getting started --------------- The first thing you need to do is create a DEGAS picture and name it TRACE.PI?, were the '?' is 1,2 or 3 depending on what resolution you're working with. TRACE also understands DEGAS compressed pictures, so you can create a compressed picture called TRACE.PC?. Compressed pictures take up less disc space, but they take a moment to uncompress, which slows down the display a bit. You decide which is more important to you. You'll also want some sound and text files, and some other picture files to work with. Files used with TRACE must meet the following criteria: 1.) Picture files must be in DEGAS "normal" or compressed format. 2.) Text files must be normal, ASCII text files with the extention .TXT. Each line must end with a CR/LF combination, and the maximum number of lines in the file is 24 (actually the file can have more lines in it, but TRACE will only display the first 24). Most ASCII editors will work just fine. Note: unlike CONNECTIONS, text information is not centered on the screen when displayed. The text will appear in a box that will be positioned next to the mouse cursor. For this reason the maximum line length depends on where the text is displayed on the screen. Play around with text files with long lines and you'll see what I mean. 3.) Sound files can use the signed or unsigned format, and the file extension must denote the playback speed. (i.e. the sound file PHASER.096 is played back at 9600 Hz). This file naming convention has been championed by Dave Baggett and I highly recommend it. Now that you've got a picture called TRACE.PI? (or TRACE.PC?), hold down both the ALTERNATE and CONTROL keys and double click on TRACE.PRG. Holding down the ALT and CNTRL keys while the program is loading puts TRACE into "create" mode which allows you to create your presentations. (BEWARE, some other programs, like NEODESK and DCSHOWER, use a similar technique to invoke special options. Actually holding down various combinations of the CTRL, ALT and SHIFT keys has become a much overused means of activating special features in all kinds of programs. If TRACE doesn't appear to be going into CREATE mode, it may be because another program is intercepting the ALT/CTRL key press. You'll have to try booting your computer without some accessories or auto-folder programs to find the offending program. Bummer.) If you do NOT hold down ALT and CTRL while launching TRACE.PRG, the program goes into "play" mode and it will start your presentation from the TRACE.PI? picture, which is what happened when you ran the demo. When the file selector appears, select your TRACE.PI? picture file. Now begins the process of creating the TRACE.TR? file, which will contain the information used to recreate your presentation. If TRACE can't find TRACE.TR?, you'll be presented with a couple of dialogs to select which type of sound output device and driver to use as well as what sound format you'll be using. All these parameters are passed to PLAY.PRG which does the actual sound playback, and you should read that programs documentation for more details. If you're not going to be playing back sound samples, just select the defaults. If you use other pictures in your presentation, you should invoke TRACE in create mode and select the other picture files so that *.TR? files can be created for them also. (For instance, if you use the picture SMILES.PC2 in your presentation, you'll want to use TRACE to create the file SMILES.TR2, which will contain the sound, text and graphic information for that picture.) Each DEGAS picture file in your presentation should have an accompanying .TR? file. OK, now your TRACE.PI? picture is on the screen. Use the mouse to outline a section of the screen. Use the old, familiar left-click-and-hold and drag technique to create a resizable box. Once the box is defined, a file selector will appear. Select the picture (PI? or PC?), sound or text file you want activated when the user clicks within the box you just defined. Once you select a file, the outline box changes to a dashed line and the info is stored in the .TR? file. (Selecting CANCEL from the file selector, causes the outline box to remain a dash-dot line, and the information is NOT stored.) Continue selecting boxes on the screen and corresponding files. When you're done press the ESC key. Repeat this process for each of your picture files, linking each piece of the screen to a sound or text file or another picture file. To replay you presentation, run the TRACE.PRG program without holding the ALT and CTRL keys. That's about it. Rather then go on and on with more instructions, I'll just say "try it!" I've run TRACE many, many times while debugging code, so it seems pretty easy to me. I'm sure I've left out some minor details, but if you play with it a while you'll get the hang of it. 6.) A few notes ----------- TRACE stores its file information as whole, complete path names in the .TR? files. I've found it convenient to go into the .TR? file and edit the path name to be relative (to the directory that contains TRACE.PRG). You might too. Just use your favorite ASCII text editor. You'll also notice that the first line in a .TR? file contains parameters passed to PLAY.PRG. You can edit that line also and use any of the parameters described in the PLAY.PRG documentation. For some reason, GEM doesn't recognize mouse clicks in the menu bar portion of the screen. So, you won't be able to create a resizable box starting in the first 10 (med rez) or 20 (high rez) pixels from the top of the screen. C'est la vie. If you don't have a harddrive, everything works MUCH better from a RAM disc. Copy TRACE.PRG and PLAY.PRG and your graphics/sound/text files onto the RAM disc and things will just zip. There are a couple RAM discs that will automatically load files and work very well when you want to create a standalone TRACE presentation on floppy disc (Don't want little kids mucking with the hard drive? Hmmmm....) I've used the RDE.PRG RAM disc that originally came with the Mark Williams C compiler. It's available in the public domain on GEnie and works great. If anyone has gripes or suggestions, send them my way. K.LORD on GEnie. Keith Lord 2/21/93