11 February 1995 SHOWER - The pictureviewer written by Blade of New Core version 1.0 WHAT IS SHOWER? --------------- Shower is a simple, fast and easy to use Pictureviewer. It supports 18 different fileformats (12 if you count all the six Degas-formats as one) including popular formats as GIF, IFF and IMG. LEGAL STUFF ----------- Shower is freeware. You may spread it as much as you want as long as this textfile is included with the program. The entire program except for the GIF-depacker is written by Blade of New Core. The GIF-depacker is taken from Sascha Springer's TurboGIF and is copyright Sascha Springer. I didn't ask Sascha for permission to use his routine in Shower, but hope (and think) that he doesn't mind. New Core takes no responsibility whatsoever for this product, you are entirely on your own if you intend to use it. However, we have taken precautions in order to make it as reliable, stable and harmless as possible and find it really hard to belive that this piece of software would be able to destroy or mess something up. HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS --------------------- Shower needs a Falcon 030 to run. It works on both RGB and VGA-monitors. It should work without problems on accelerated Falcons, but will probably get problems with graphics-cards. Resolution enhancers like Blow Up should work without a problem though. HOW TO USE SHOWER ----------------- Place the icon for Shower on your desktop and drag the picturefile you want to view to it and drop it. Shower will now be started and the picturefile loaded. If something goes wrong (not enough memory, corrupt picturefile, unsuported fileformat etc.) Shower will (hopefully) quit back to the desktop. If everything goes ok you will see the picture within som seconds (or fractions of a second if its a small picture). If the picture is bigger than the screen you can scroll around it using the mouse or cursor-keys. Press left mousebutton to change resolution. A press on the right mouse- button quits Shower. FUNCTIONS --------- Scroll around ------------- Using the Cursor Keys or by moving the Mouse you can scroll around the picture if it is larger than the screen. You can't scroll around properly when displaying 2-color pictures, since the Falcon-hardware can't hardwarescroll properly in this resolution. Change resolution ----------------- With + and - on the numeric keypad you can change the resolution between low- and hires. A press on the left mousekey will do the same. You can't switch to hires if the picture is displayed in True-Color-Mode and you are using a VGA-monitor. Colormode/Black & White ----------------------- Use F1 to switch between color and B/W-display. Does not work in True Color. Bordercolor ----------- If the picture is smaller than 640x480 you will get a border around it. This border is normally drawn in the darkest color found in the palette (normally black). By pressing F2 you can switch between a dark or bright border. Binary Dump ----------- By pressing Control + Alternate + F10 you will save down a binary dump of the picture. The picturedata will be called SAVEDPIC.BIN and placed in the current directory (either Top Window or the directory of Shower, depending on desktop settings). A file called SAVEDPIC.PAL is also created and contains a binary dump of the palette (from address $ffff9800). Finally a file called SAVEDPIC.TXT is created that describes the binary dump (X-resolution, Y-resolution and amount of colors). SUPPORTED FILEFORMATS --------------------- Shower supports the following fileformats: .ART Art Director .BMP PC-Bitmap (still buggy and only 256-color pictures) .DOO/.MUR Doodle/Object Editor Mural (same fileformat) .GIF Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format .IFF IFF .IMG GEM Bit Image (including XIMG) .MAC/.MPT MacPaint .NEO Neochrome .PC1 Degas Low-res compressed .PC2 Degas Mid-res compressed .PC3 Degas Hi-res compressed .PI1 Degas Low-res .PI2 Degas Mid-res .PI3 Degas Hi-res .PI9 Extended Degas (320*240 in 256 colors) .RAG RAG-D! .RAW Persistence of Vision (POV) Raytracer output. .TRU IndyPaint (only pictures with "Indy"-header, no blocks) WHY USE SHOWER AND NOT GEM-VIEW? -------------------------------- Well, there are many reasons: 1. Gem-View requires registration if you really want to use. Shower is public domain. 2. Gem-View is a slow program, it takes ages for it to display a picture. Shower is a very fast program, written entirely in assembly. 3. Gem-View displays the picture in a window in the resolution it was started in (nice if you have a good graphics card, though). Shower finds out what resolution is needed to display the picture correctly and switches to that and you don't have some stupid desktop-background and windows disturbing you. 4. Gem-View have loads of features that normally aren't used and thus only takes a lot of memory that could be used for something else. 5. If you want to save down your pictures for use in your own programs it can easily be done with Shower since it can create a binary dump of the picture and palette (without any headers or packing) that easily can be included in your own program. WHY USE SHOWER AND NOT TURBOGIF? -------------------------------- Well if your picturelibrary only consists of GIF-files and you are using Turbogif, you're probably only interested in knowing what Shower's advantages over Turbogif are, so here they come: 1. Turbogif is very buggy, it freezes my computer about every fifth time I use it. This have never happened with Shower (unless I have loaded a corrupt picturefile). 2. Turbogif needs about 3 MEGs of free memory in order to run, independently of the size of the picture you want to watch. This is because it uses fixed buffers for its operations. Shower dynamically allocates the amount of memory it needs. 3. Turbogif is limited to a fixed maximum size when it comes to pictures. Pictures bigger than 1280 x 960 might crash the computer. I haven't been able to test Shower with such big pictures, but it should work with pictures of almost unlimited size (available memory is the only limit). Even when watching a picture of a greater size than 1280 x 960 it shouldn't take the 3 MEGs that Turbogif requires since Shower uses its memorybuffers more efficiently. 4. Shower is a bit faster (up to 2 seconds on the biggest GIF-file I have), since I use a faster chunkypixel > bitplane-conversion-routine. Still some people might find Shower to be a bit slower since it doesn't display the picture until its totally drawn. 5. Shower can view the picture in both hi-res and low-res. 6. Shower is a bit less bugy, I managed to display a picture with Shower that Turbogif messed up a bit. 7. Shower works both on VGA & RGB (PAL & NTSC). 8. TurboGif can't be started from 4-colormodes or ST-compatibility-modes. 9. Shower is not limited to GIF-files. WHY THIS STUPID NAME? --------------------- By simply combining normal Swedish gramatical rules with English words, you get that a utility for showing a picture is a "Picture Shower". This is pure, simple gramatics. Don't blame me because the Englishspeaking population on this earth can't keep their gramatics straight! This is why I call this program "Shower" and not "Viewer". KNOWN BUGS ---------- - Shower doesn't display BMP-files correctly all the time. The colors in the palette are mixed up and I still can only display 256-color BMP's. I need more information about the BMP-format in order to fix this. - No support for IMG-files with "STTT"-palette since I haven't found an IMG-file with this feature yet and been able to test it out. - The sidescrolling of a 2-color picture doesn't work properly, this since it isn't possible for the Falcon to hardwarescroll a 2-color picture correctly. I'm planning to patch this by using a second screen in 2-color mode in the future. - I guess there are some extensions to the IFF-format that I still don't support. HOW TO SUPPORT DEVELOPMENT OF THIS PRODUCT: ------------------------------------------- You can support the further development of this product by writing me and tell me what you thought about Shower. Tell me about all (if any) bugs you have found and what you would like me to include. If you have any information about an unsuported fileformat you can always send it to me along with some examplefiles and I might include it in a future version. Don't bother to send me docs about TGA, TNY, SPC, SPU, SPC or any other fileformat that I probably already have. Don't send me any info about JPEG either, I won't write my own JPEG-depacker (but might use Brainstorms decoder if I can get hold of the needed documentation). If you have any well-detailed info about TIFF, PCX or BMP then please send it to me. I really would like to include these formats. THANKS AND GREETINGS: --------------------- Dead Hackers Society (thanks for the betatesting) H†kan Bratt (Sysop at Toxic BBS, containing New Core & UDS supportareas) All other members of New Core (Lightlord, Shrimp, Marko & The Gambler) All my friends at Unique Development Sweden Exellence In Art Zeal TSCC (thanks for all the letters!) Lazer Code of TBL (the creator of Octalyser STE) Lance (anything going on nowadays?) Techwave of ICE (are you still coding?) Dune Impact Software (good luck with your game) Aggression (the same to you...) CGD ST in Hungary (Hi Daniel!) HOW TO CONTACT THE AUTHOR ------------------------- Tord Jansson Sk„ggetorp Centrum 8 582 38 LINK™PING SWEDEN Phone: +46-13-179123 E-mail: tord.jansson@pointless.ct.se FidoNet: 2:204/428.16