At The Movies II by Eric W. Schwartz ©1991 (1995 Revision) As they say, 'Those high-concept pieces'll kill ya every time.' At the Movies 2 is one of those pieces. Obviously a sequel to the original At the Movies, a sexist but popular cartoon starring Amy the Squirrel.(God knows WHY it's as popular as it is. I know most women aren't too crazy about it, including Amy.) So here comes At The Movies 2, nearly one full year in the making (working on and off) animated on paper, digitised with Digi-View, retraced in Dpaint 3, additional drawing in the Disney Animation Studio, Colored in Dpaint 3 and later Dpaint 4, Edited and timed in PP&S' Animation Station, and presentation in The Director 2. This animation runs approximately 1 minute 45 seconds when running in the fully loaded version. This is ESSSA (Eric Schwartz's second shareware animation) . If you feel it's worth it, send me five bucks to help me pay for college. (If not, don't.) MINIMUM CONFIGURATION: Any Amiga with one megabyte of memory and two floppy drives (You might be able to get away with one drive.) RECOMMENDED CONFIGURATION: Any Amiga with 4meg or more memory, an accelerator, and a hard drive (this allows the anim to play at full speed, and load completely into memory quickly. My best Amiga is only three megs , an HD, and no accelerator. Awwww . ) * Due to the nature of the player, This Animation will not run properly on AGA Amigas (A1200 & A4000) and presumably Amigas running OS 3.0 and above. Another Variant of the animation that does work correctly on the High-end machines is available on the CD-ROM release, and I would recommend running that instead. There are three releases of this animation available now. The first is the Floppy release set to run from four floppy disks labeled "Amy1" thru "Amy4" The second release is the same as the floppy version, but is automatically setup to run from its own drawer on a hard drive, CD-ROM, or what have you. These are both the "old" version of At the Movies 2, and does not appear to work on OS3.0 and above. That's why this third release has been created. It is a remastered animation with different player software to run on the A1200, A4000, and other Amigas with 3.0 or greater OS. The new animation does not require AGA to run, so Any Amiga with 2.0 OS or better and the proper memory and drive space should be able to play the newer variant. OLD VERSION (Floppy and Hard Disk versions) There are five configurations for playing the older variant of the animation, One meg, Two meg, Three meg and Two and Three meg versions for people with accelerators (68020 or better). The different version all play the same animation, but the lower memory versions load the animation in sections, pausing during play. unlike the others, the one meg version has no sound. As the animation loads from floppy, the screen on which the Anim is displayed must remain in front, but when the system requests a new disk, the workbench screen is popped to front and stays there. you can either avoid this by insterting the next disk (sequentially 1-4) before it is needed, or hitting left AMIGA-M to return the player screen to front after the requester has appeared. Otherwise the animation will play behind the workbench where you can't see it. The 3-meg version will fill the entire 3 megs very tightly. I recomend shutting down all tasks and closing windows before trying it, especially if you have a hard drive and two floppy drives eating up memory, hence the 3.5 meg recommendation. You can boot from the Amy1: disk which will give you a choice to run the one-meg or three meg versions. this will save memory, but all you can do then is run the animation from the floppies. if you want to run a different version on booting from Amy1:, like the two-meg or the accelerated versions, you will have to modify the startup sequence in a text editor. If all else fails running the 3-meg anim, run the two-meg one. The anim uses the Times.font (Bitmap, not CGTimes) for its titles. If you have it in your system fonts: directory, I recommend you remove the Assign fonts: Amy1:fonts statement from the correct icon script with a text editor. this assignment has been known to cause problems in certain situations. NEW VERSION: This version requires 4 megs or more of memory and about three megs of disk space to hold it. there are no other options for running it. there are a number of differences between this version and the older version ADVANTAGES OF THE NEW ONE: * While the animation is not AGA enhanced, there are some nifty transition enhancements, like fades and crossfades. * The sound is partially improved over the older one, with less clean fade effects, but more and better sound effects. * It runs generally faster than the old version * It works on AGA/3.0, and its the only version that does. DISADVANTAGES: * There is only one version, and it requires at least as much memory as the most demanding variant of the old version. * The titles of the new version are in low-res, like the rest of the animation, while the old version had kinda nifty Hi-res titles. * LICENSE: This Animation is Copyright (c) 1991 Eric W. Schwartz. It is NOT to be considered Public Domain. This animation is Freely Distributable as long as the files for each variation are unaltered and kept together with this README text file. Permission from the Author must be obtained before these files can be converted to other formats, including but not limited to Video, Print, Or computer formats other than Amiga. Finally, characters created for these animations (ESPECIALLY AMY THE SQUIRREL) are the sole property of Eric W. Schwartz, and should not be used in pictures and animations by others. As Always, Eric Schwartz E.S. Productions P.O. Box 292684 Kettering, OH 45429-0684 USA P.S. - I want to apologise to all those folks out there in the international Amiga community who have written letters to me and not recieved a response. I am a notoriously bad procrastinator, especially when it comes to letter writing.