MoviePRO - an ANIM player for Movie and ANIM5 animations -------------------------------------------------------- Version Beta 4, 14-Feb-91 This program and iff.library by: Christian A. Weber, Bruggerweg 2, CH-8037 Zürich, SWITZERLAND Any suggestions or bug reports are welcome, e-mail to: UUCP: {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmehq!cbmswi!mighty!chris INTERNET: cbmehq!cbmswi!mighty!chris@cbmvax.commodore.com BIX: chw THIS PROGRAM IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. IT MAY BE FREELY DISTRUBUTED, COPIED AND USED FOR COMMERCIAL OR NON-COMMERCIAL PURPOSES. YOU ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE CHANGES TO THE SHOWIFF.* FILES AS LONG AS YOU CLEARLY MARK THE CHANGES. DISCLAIMER THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS". NO REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES ARE MADE WITH RESPECT TO THE ACCURACY, RELIABILITY, PERFORMANCE, CURRENTNESS, OR OPERATION OF THIS SOFTWARE, AND ALL USE IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. YOU ALREADY KNEW THAT, DIDN'T YOU. THE AUTHOR ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY WHATSOEVER WITH RESPECT TO YOUR USE OR INABILITY TO USE OF THIS SOFTWARE. *** FEATURES -------- - Plays Movie animations (Created with Sculpt 3D/4D or DILBM/PILBM) and ANIM5 animations (Videoscape, DPaint...). - Runs from both Workbench and CLI, creates an AppIcon under Kickstart 2.x - Uses double-buffering for best results - Is fully multi-tasking compatible! REQUIREMENTS ------------ MoviePRO requires the arp.library and, of course, the iff.library. These two files should be located in the LIBS: directory. Currently, MoviePRO requires 10 KBytes of stack. Make sure you set this stack size in EVERY animation's icon, or a guru will visit you! Note: This is only a beta release and has many bugs! Beware! WORKBENCH USAGE --------------- Under Kickstart 1.3: Select all animations you wish to view while pressing the SHIFT key, then double-click the MoviePRO icon. You can also set the animation's default tool to MoviePRO using WorkBench's 'Info' feature. You must set the stack size to at least 10K in the icon. If you wish to display all the animations in a drawer, select the drawer, and while depressing the SHIFT key, double-click the MoviePRO icon. This works even with disk icons! If a drawer or disk contains another drawer, the animations in that drawer will also be displayed. Under Kickstart 2.x: Under Kickstart 2.x you have an additional possibility, which you may prefer once you are familiar with Kickstart 2.x: You can put MoviePRO in your WBStartup drawer. When you boot your Amiga, MoviePRO is automatically started and creates an "AppIcon". This icon looks like any other icon, and you can freely chose it's name and it's position (see below). But this icon has an interesting feature: You can view an animation by simply dragging the icon of that animation on MoviePRO's AppIcon. This works for drawers and disks too, of course. If you wish to remove the MoviePRO AppIcon, simply start MoviePRO again. Tool Types: MoviePRO understands several tool types. You can edit them using the "Show Information" or "Info" commands from the Workbench menu. Here's a list of the recognized tool types: ICONXPOS Specifies the x coordinate of MoviePRO's AppIcon. This works only under Kickstart 2.x and above. Example: ICONXPOS=620 ICONYPOS Specifies the y coordinate of MoviePRO's AppIcon. This works only under Kickstart 2.x and above. Example: ICONYPOS=120 ICONNAME Specifies the name of MoviePRO's AppIcon (Only Kickstart 2.x). Example: ICONNAME=Animation Player OPTIONS Here you can specify several options, in the same format as if you would enter them from CLI. Works under 1.3 too. Example: OPTIONS=ALL LOOP 5 NOOVERSCAN TASKPRI If you have a slow processor or a complex animation, MoviePRO needs more processor time to display the animation in the desired speed. If you set TASKPRI to some value higher than 0, MoviePRO will run slightly faster. Note that in this case you should not run any time-critical software (such as terminal programs) while playing animations. TASKPRI can be set to any value between -128 and 127. Example: TASKPRI=50 CLI USAGE --------- The template is: Patterns/...,ALL/s,C=CONTINUOUS/k,L=LOOP/k,T=TIMING/k,NO=NOOVERSCAN/s,V=VERBOSE/s MoviePRO [ALL] [CONTINUOUS num] [LOOP num] [TIMING jiffies] [NOOVERSCAN] Example: MoviePRO Anim/* Sculpt/foo.anim CONTINUOUS 32000 TIMING 3 patterns can be any number of file names, directories or disk names. All of the ARP wildcards can be used. (?,*,#?,...) ALL if this keyword is specified, animations in sub-directories will also be shown. CONTINUOUS n This determines how many times the animation is displayed. LOOP n With LOOP you can specify how many times the animation is played, but not continuously. This is for animations which are not designed as endless-loop-animations. TIMING n specifies the delay between the frames of the animation, in jiffies. Note that if you have a complex animation or a slow processor, values lower than three (3) are not guaranteed to give the desired results. NOOVERSCAN display all animations in the size of the Workbench screen, and never in overscan. This is not very useful ;-) VERBOSE This is only for debugging and should never be used. KEYS AND MOUSE-BUTTONS ---------------------- While an animation is displayed, you can press the following keys: LEFT MOUSE BUTTON Display the next animation. If there are no more animations to show, MoviePRO closes its window and terminates. If in AppIcon mode, MoviePRO closes its window and waits for new animations. RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON Abort immediately Ctrl-C (if the MoviePRO window or the CLI window is active) Abort immediately Ctrl-E (if the MoviePRO window or the CLI window is active) If you started MoviePRO from Workbench, ore enabled the "ALL" option from CLI, pressing Ctrl-E will skip all animations in the current sub-directory, and return to the parent-directory (like in the CLI "Dir" command).