Prism 1.10 - The Amiga ANSI Animator By: Colin Vernon INTRODUCTION Welcome to Prism! Prism is an ANSI graphics animators for the Amiga. No, Prism does not make high resolution pictures, it makes those neat animated screens that you see over the modem. The reason why I call it an ANSI animator instead of an ANSI editor is because this program was designed to make animated screens and not simple colour title screens. I hope that you find this program as handy as I do! Now, on with the docs. RUNNING PRISM Unfortunately, the only way you can run Prism is through the CLI. I have tried to create an icon for it but the program crashes either when you enter it or when you exit it. There is now only one way to run Prism and that is: 1> Prism That's it! The number of bitplanes that you want to work with is now internally defined so you won't have to exit and re-enter the program to change the number of bitplanes you want to work with. Prism, once running, semi-detaches itself from the CLI. What I mean is that you can execute commands from the CLI that is running Prism but you cannot close that CLI until Prism is deactivated. This problem probably has something to do with the way the program tries to access the console.device and InputEvent structure. THE DISPLAY When you activate Prism for a session, you notice two major things: the title bar and the gadget window. The title bar has the program name and my name in it. This is a screen title bar so you can pull down the entire screen by clicking and holding onto it with the mouse pointer. In the top right hand corner, there are some front and back gadgets. These gadgets are also attached to the screen so that you can click the screen to the back or bring the screen to the front easily. The gadget box has 17 gadgets and a number of indicators. The gadgets numbered from 0 to 15 are the colour gadgets. If you want to switch the colour that you are working with, just click the desired colour. The Fore/Back gadget is used to get at the background colours. If you want to change the foreground colour, just click on the colour. If you want to change the background colour, however, you must click on the Fore/Back gadget first then select the colour you want to change the background colour to. The only valid background colours are from 0 to 7. The valid foreground colours are any one of the colour gadgets. The colour gadgets are shown according to the colour number you'll get in the ANSI file. So, gadget #1 is red, gadget #7 is white, et cetera. If the ANSI colour palette that you are working with is different than the one provided in Prism, the colours that you want will be easy to find as long as you know what number values correspond to your program that you want to display the ANSI on. For example, the #1 gadget will output an [31m for a foreground colour and [41m for a background colour. The indicators are as follows: Pos: This indicates where you are editing in your animation. One of the more powerful functions of this program is the ability to edit an ANSI file IN THE MIDDLE of your animation (a feature even TheDraw lacks!) How you edit a file this way will be covered later on in the documentation. Len: This is the length of you ANSI file in visible characters (characters that are actually seen when viewing the ANSI file). The Pos: indicator will never exceed Len: and Pos: will never be less that 0. Len: is NOT the actual length of your ANSI file when saved to disk. ForeC: This is your current foreground colour. The text in this box should correspond with the foreground and background colours that you have selected. BackC: This is your current background colour. C: This is the position of your cursor in column/row form. The cursor is that superimposed underscore and "overscore" character. The colour of the cursor should vary according to the colours that you have set in Preferences. P: This is the position of your mouse pointer in column/row form. This feature is handy if you want to see where a particular character is without moving the cursor around. Set: Your current graphics set is displayed here. Prism presently has 12 different "sets" of IBM graphic characters. If you want to see the next set, press F9. For the prior set, press F10. Prism will wrap around once you go beyond the 12th set and before the 1st set. THE KEYS Obviously, you press the character keys on the keyboard to create your ANSI file. If you are using a customized keymap (like your own created with a keymap editor of some sort or programs such as Mach II) some of the keys may not work or may not work as expected. Remember the Pos: indicator? This is the reason why it exists. The left cursor key (indicated with a <- in this doc from now on) and the right cursor key (same with ->) have a special purpose when used in conjunction with the CTRL key. If you type some text and hold CTRL and press the <- key, you will notice that your characters will start to disappear. The characters are NOT being deleted but being replaced by the character that was in that position before. If there wasn't anything in that place, a space will appear in that position. Holding CTRL and pressing the <- key will bring you backwards through you ANSI file while holding CTRL and pressing -> will bring you forward through your ANSI file. This feature gives you the ability to edit character in the middle of your file instead of starting over from scratch. The backspace key will delete the current character Pos: is at. What this means if you just used the CTRL <- or CTRL -> combination, it will be the character right underneath the cursor. Otherwise, the character that will be deleted will be the last one typed. The TAB key will move the cursor to the next tab place which is pre-set to every 8 spaces. If the cursor is beyond the last tab space, the cursor will appear on the line below in the first column. The RETURN key will move the cursor to the first column in the next row, if there is a next row. The cursor keys will move the cursor around the 80 column by 24 row editing screen. The cursor will NOT wrap around the edges. Finally, the HELP key controls the gadget box. The HELP key will put the gadget box in front of the edit window if the gadget box is not visible and vice versa. THE MENU The Project Menu: About: Displays information about distribution of the program. Playback: Displays what you have typed in in the order that you typed the characters in from beginning to end. Hold down the mouse button if you wish to speed up the rate of display to maximum speed. Clear: Erases the current ANSI file in memory. This command will ask you if you really want to do this and if you want to save the file before you clear it if you had made any changes to your file. Load: Loads an ANSI file. Choosing this option will bring up a file requester where you can: select the drawer gadget and type in a path name, select the file gadget and type in a file name (and the program will try to load the file as soon as you press RETURN), select a filename when it appears in one of the slots in the middle of the requester, move the slider gadget to see different parts of the filename list, select PARENT to go to the parent directory, select OK to load the specified file or select CANCEL to cancel the load. Selecting the OK gadget will make the computer clear the ANSI file in memory so make sure you save your file in memory before executing this command. Save: Saves the ANSI file in memory. This command will bring up the same requester as the Load command but the file will be recorded on disk or in memory. This save feature will make sure that no output line is longer than 255 characters. Append: This is a submenu containing two items. Load - This command is the same as the previous load command except that the ANSI file in memory is not cleared and the loading file will be attached to the end. Save - This command is the same as the previous save command except that this file will attach itself to the end of the filename specified. If the filename does not exist on the storage device, it acts just like a regular save. Quit: End you session with Prism. The program will ask you if you are sure that you want to execute this command. If you have not saved your ANSI file with all the changes you have made, the program will ask you if you want to save the file with all its new changes. The Setup Menu: Colors: This was the only command that I got around to in this menu. There are three subitems which are... 4 Colors - Reduces the display to 2 bitplanes or 4 colors. This will make Prism go a bit faster and use less memory but you will not be able to see all of the colors ANSI can give you. Some characters may als appear invisible. 8 Colors - Same as above except display has 3 bitplanes or 8 colors. 16 Colors - This is the default option when Prism boots up. The display is made up of 4 bitplanes so you'll be able to see all 16 colors available. The problem with this mode is that most programs that involve ANSI do not understand this code. if you see italic letters in your ANSI displays or background colors shit themselves off for some reason, this is it: you must use 4 or 8 color mode. DONORS OF PRISM The following in a list of all the people who have given me a donation towards Prism: Rodney Marks, Giampaolo Fabiani (I'll still looking for you!), Nicholas Brenckle, Neall Verheyde, Daniel Stephens, Lawrence Evans, Detlef Trimborn, Tom Galloway, Kai Seidel, Darren Nye, Kevin Nugent, Brendan Pratt, David Streeter, Rinaldo Petterino, and Mark Daniel. Thanks a lot for supporting Prism and the Shareware concept. FUTURE POSSIBILITIES I am leaving the future of Prism up to the C programmers of the Amiga community. I am going to the University of Waterloo (where they haven't even heard of the word "Amiga") so I am selling my 2000 and getting an MS-DOS machine for those 5 years. When I get out, I might get an Amiga 3000 (or 4000 if they are out by that time) so that I can continue programming on them if I detest MS-DOS or just miss my Amiga. If I receive any more donations for Prism, they shall be destroyed if it is by cheque and mailed back without the disk if it is a money order or just money. I think that I have enough to go to UW, I hope :-) -- Colin Vernon (6/19/90)