Last month I promised to tell you how to display AGA pictures using Amos. As you know, Amos does not directly support AGA graphics, but your Amiga A1200/A4000 does, and that's good enough. All we need to do is use Amos Pro's "Exec" instruction to execute an external program like PPShow or ViewTek. In fact, we can display virtually ANY format of picture we like, as long as we have an external displayer program that accepts arguments.
So, here is my three line listing I used to display a GIF image taken from a P.C CD Rom.
Amos To Back
Exec "df0:c/ppshow CAR.GIF"
Amos To Front
The first line, "Amos To Back" pops your Workbench screen into view and hides Amos's screen.
The second line does all the work. I have used the PPShow V4 P.D program as it displays GIF images as well as many other file formats. I have PPShow in the "C" directory of the disk in DF0: so its path is DF0:c/ The picture I want displaying is called CAR.GIF. You may need to change the path and file names to make this listing work for your own programs of course.
When the user has clicked the right mouse button, PPShow quits and the last line in the listing, "Amos To Front" will then be executed, bringing you full control again.
At this point you could use more "Exec" calls to display more pictures. In fact this is how some Amos written slideshow's manage to display non-Amiga file formats and AGA pictures, more on this later.
You could use this technique for displaying loading screens in your programs. You will not be able to do anything to the image using Amos instructions as Amos has nothing directly to do with the image, but you could manipulate the image using a mixture of other P.D programs like image converters etc. Let me know if you do knock up anything interesting.
* Amos Classic users do not have the "Exec" instruction. See last month's column on how to get around this.
*Important*
You may need to gain the authors permission before including
a program with one of your own. So check first with the author
for permission if you intend to release your program.